Jug Face
My Review: This is the story of a really weird backwoods village somewhere in the South. The people there worship a pit - an actual pit. It’s a dirty hole in the ground with muddy water at the bottom. But apparently it has healing powers, provided they feed it a person’s blood every so often when it asks for some. How does it ask? Glad
you asked! It sends a psychic vision to a guy in town who sculpts a jug with the face of a villager on it, and that villager is the one they have to sacrifice. That’s just the backstory though - the actual story is about a girl who finds a jug with her own face on it, and hides it so she doesn’t have to get killed. Things go badly.
This movie is
really well done. It effortlessly creates this fantasy world and pulls you right in. It just all makes sense and builds together into a totally real world without holding your hand along the way and insulting your intelligence. You have to figure it out, but it’s easy to do. There are only two downsides that I see to an otherwise excellent cinematic experience: First, the shunned boy is initially very creepy, until he opens his mouth at which point he’s like Mr. Friendly Exposition Man. It’s downright odd, and I feel like they could’ve easily kept him far more cryptic rather than just blabbing out whatever the girl needs to know, in plain English. He even comes when called and answers questions directly. It’s so improper. That is not how ghostly messengers are allowed to work!
SPOILER PARAGRAPH! Secondly, and this is the big problem, the ending of the movie is garbage. All that great buildup, I just know it’s coming together into something amazing, and... nothing. If there is a moral to this story, it’s not a very good one (like “don’t buck the system” - not a good message!). It’s just weird. And dramatically, it’s just a flop. There needed to be some element of change at the end, something happening, not the equivalent of “this was just a rough patch, things are back to normal now.” That’s what makes a story!
So great movie, right up until the last two minutes! I say make up your own ending. I was having such a great time up until the end.
My Rating: 4/5 Jugs With Faces.
My Movie Idea: I couldn’t think of a movie while watching this one because I was too busy boggling at the fact that this movie is
so similar to a story I already created! I wrote a short story a few years ago, and it was about an Inquisitor in a nazi-type world who goes to visit a remote village, where it’s his job to look for people who aren’t properly following the culture (in this world, culture is dictated by the totalitarian government - you WILL listen to Bieber!!). He ends up stumbling across, you guessed it, a big muddy pit in the woods behind the village, which the villagers worship because of the gifts it brings them. It’s almost an identical setup, right down to many of the specifics, though this movie is from a villager’s perspective while I brought in an outsider. And I had less jugs and more tentacles. I would share the story with you, but it’s much too long for here, and it was just a first draft so I assume it’s absolutely terrible and I’m not going to check for myself or I’ll even ruin my own memories of it. But anyway, what’s up with that? Brainjacked again.
