WOUND

Susan (Kate O’Rourke) answers her door to find her wayward father standing there, full of smiles and ready to survey the property, curious to see if she’s looked after the family home during his prolonged absence.

She welcomes him in, apologises for her weary state and then twats him over the head with a bat. Moments later she has him in the cellar where she throttles him with a leather cord and proceeds to hack his penis off with a pair of scissors.

At her job as a sales rep, Susan is a willing subject of sexual humiliation at the hands of her boss. He’s referred to as Master John (Campbell Cooley). He films her on his webcam while fixing pegs to her nipples and coaxing her into various degrading positions.

Why is she so complicit to John’s demands, and yet so violent towards her father? Is it down to the medication she seen to be frequently popping? Or the deep sense of regret hinted at from the start?

Perhaps troubled teenager Tanya (Ta Kaea Beri) holds the key. We’re introduced her during one afternoon at school, when she is called to an office for a bout of scheduled counselling. It transpires that she is a disturbed youth, desperate to locate the mother she’s never met.

Later that evening, Tanya visits a bondage-themed nightclub where she’s welcomed to the fold as one of the family by aged dominatrix Mistress Ruth (Sandy Lowe). Understandably perturbed by what she witnesses in this cut-rate Rectum, Tanya flees into the arms of her boyfriend and ends the night lying on rail tracks waiting for a train to come and end her pain.

Inevitably, Tanya soon finds her way to Susan’s doorstep and introduces herself as her long lost daughter. "You were dead before you were born" protests a distraught Susan …

Nevertheless, Tanya moves in with Susan and the line between reality and dream becomes increasingly blurred. A happy ending seems less and less likely …

Written and directed by David Blyth, WOUND is a world apart from his best-known film, 1984’s minor cult hit DEATH WARMED UP. Whereas that took on the mad scientist genre with a colourful sense of macabre humour and Grand Guignol punchlines, here the emphasis is on pain. Bleak, serious pain.

A washed out colour palette gives the film a depressive look from the off. It matches the listless performances. Skewered camera angles continue to create an ill atmosphere as the non-linear drama unfolds, conspiring with a ponderous score to drag the viewer’s mood down.

Some will find these tactics alienating. It’s perhaps a small mercy then that WOUND is only 77 minutes long. There’s only so much suffering an audience wants to watch.

And there is wall-to-wall sufferance here: this is a film all about suffering. About the pain of loss, the guilt that comes from that and the self-punishment people in these circumstances feel compelled to dole upon themselves. WOUND is as bleak as it sounds.

This unremittingly downbeat tone fits with scenes of proper exploitation excess, contained within a film directed by someone aspiring for art within the confines of a miniscule budget. In this sense, and taking into account the sparse amount of dialogue in WOUND, Blyth’s film reminded me superficially of Mark Savage’s DEFENCELESS.

It’s not a stretch to liken the film’s nightmarish take on reality to the more extreme visions of Luis Bunuel either: a rape perpetrated by a soiled man in pig mask; the collection of foil-covered turds growing in a chest freezer; the mystery of the mother’s headstone taking pride of place in Susan’s garden.

If it all sounds a tad pretentious and heavy-going, that’s because it is. The churning soundtrack and endless scenes of angst-ridden catharsis do become overbearing, the cheap production values never quite allowing the S&M set-pieces their desired impact.

But the combination of unconventional storytelling and old-school splatter may entice some. If it does, be sure to expect a crimson-covered birth sequence to rival the one featured in XTRO. That opening castration grabs the attention too, as does a super-gory throat slashing and messy miscarriage later into the action.

Some striking Gothic imagery and solid cinematography work alongside the B-movie gore and metaphor-heavy plot to make this a curious film indeed, one that delves into the minefield that is the female psyche. Though, what the numerous scenes shot through webcams and surveillance cameras symbolise is anyone’s guess. WOUND may take steps to muse further than your average horror film with regards to audience complicity and voyeurism, but PEEPING TOM it is not.

Blyth’s film comes to US DVD uncut courtesy of Breaking Glass.

The screener disc provided for review is not indicative of the version that will be available to buy. For what it’s worth, the preview disc presented the film in non-enhanced 1.85:1. Images exhibited a generally faded look throughout, with colours being only intermittently well-rendered. The scenes shot through surveillance cameras were especially milky.

English audio came in a fine, well-balanced 2.0 mix.

There were no extras or even menus on the disc viewed. However, I understand the retail disc will proffer the film in a 16x9 presentation with 5.1 audio, along with a trailer, two music video clips and – best of all – Blyth’s short debut from 1976, CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS.

I’m not sure I like WOUND a great deal. But I will commend it for its refusal to play to the tune of most modern day horror films. It aspires to be something deeper, a surreal journey into the twisted sub-conscious of a mother racked with matriarchal guilt. It’s little wonder that the late Ken Russell apparently hailed the film as a masterpiece of psycho-sexual concepts.

Hard to watch (but better upon a second viewing) and damaged by a budget insufficient of the film’s creative requirements, WOUND is nevertheless an intriguing and blood-soaked proposition for those with a bent for horror films which stray to the left of the middle.

Review by Stuart Willis