Billed as the goriest, bloodiest, and most depraved film showing at the Toronto After Dark festival, Inbred teeters between different subgenres of the survival horror sect, leaving a bad taste in your mouth. And maybe an upset stomach.

Set in the U.K., a group of mostly unlikeable bratty kids are taken on a team-building, community service endeavor with a pair of a bit more likeable caretakers into the middle of nowhere. They reside in a creepy, dirty abandoned house, grab a drink at the disgusting local pub, and greet a group of slimy, rotten locals.

We have our ominous grey skies, foreboding animals, and ‘we don’t take kindly to outsiders’ attitudes from the townspeople, all of which set up a very Texas Chainsaw Massacre feeling movie. The film takes it’s time setting up the uncomfortable mood, and it finally delivers when an accident leaves one of the group in a bloody, crippled mess.

Looking for assistance, the townspeople only help to end the victim’s misery in a sudden, bloody mess. We slowly discover these country folk like to entertain themselves with circus-like shows, where victims are brutally killed. This is of course when they are not pleasuring themselves with animals and what not.

So it’s pretty uncomfortable. Instead of maintaining this mood throughout, however, the film switches, somewhere between the second and third death, and becomes something far more silly and ridiculous. We don’t really have to like the victims—this is a horror after all so most people are cheering for creative and bloody deaths—but they should at least be a bit clever and put up for a fight. The bane of many slasher flicks is present here too, as our survivalists makes indefensible dumb choices time after time, opting for inaction over and over.

And while they wait too, so do we. Building from the start to a climactic first death, the movie fizzles, and becomes more a show without any direction. Perhaps that is the point. Just like the deathly show put on for the incestuous and depraved hillbillies, one gratuitous and random, we get the same. Does that mean we are these same sick and twisted people watching from the stands in the film, wearing pig masks and missing our teeth?

Well, no. The movie isn’t trying to be that deep, but it is an interesting thought. Inbred definitely delivers on the blood and gore, yet with six victims (it shouldn’t surprise you that at least half die), the film is strangely lazy with one of the deaths.

It is creepy enough to linger in your head for a few days, and bloody enough to satisfy your gory appetite for longer, but mentally and emotionally, there is nothing there. The same goes for the characters, those fornicating within their own gene pool, and without.

[star v=2]

Gore Rating: