Chad Crawford Kinkle’s first – and to date only – feature languished in the “to watch” pile for longer than it should have done under the mistaken belief that , based on the title, it was going to be just another slasher/serial killer film, focusing on the doings of its eponymous killer. It turns out to be something far more interesting than that, an exercise in backwoods folk horror boasting an impressive cast and an unusually nuanced script. The setting is a remote, never-identified corner of rural America where a small and dwindling community worships a mysterious deity that lurks in a pit near their settlement and demands regular human sacrifices. The victims are revealed in psychic vision to potter Dawai (Sean Bridgers) who fashions jugs with the faces of the chosen ones while in a trance (hence the rather odd title).
His latest sculpture is of teenager Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) who is pregnant following an incestuous relationship with her brother Jessaby (Daniel Manche) and is to be “joined” to another man, Bodey (Mathieu Whitman). When Ada discovers the jug she panics and hides it in the woods, leading to multiple deaths around the village as the never-seen deity emerges from its pit and punishes its followers for failing to follow the rules. Ada is haunted by the ghost of an emaciated teenage boy, one of the “shunned”, lost souls who haunt the surrounding woods and plagued by visions apparently sent to her by the thing in the pit that allow her to see the grisly deaths of the other villagers, including some of those closest to her. Things get out of hand as the bodies mount up and an increasingly panicked Ada tries – and mostly fails – to keep sorting out the mess that she’s created.
Jug Face (also released as The Pit, which doesn’t sound anywhere near as likely to be a serial killer film) doesn’t begin promisingly. It starts as though it’s going to run through the usual “hillbilly”/backswoods cliches by Kinkle, who also wrote the script, takes the road-less-travelled by actually exploring his characters in some depth and leaving open some ambiguity as to the morality of this strange little community. He’s helped no end by a cast that also includes Sean Young and genre stalwart Larry Fessenden as Ada’s parents and by strong performances from Carter and Bridgers that actually make you care about the characters, particularly as the consequences of Ada’s actions spiral out of control. When we reach the resolutely downbeat finale what becomes of some of the characters is a genuine gut punch – it’s still common to spend most of a horror film wishing the bad guy would turn up and do us all a favour by killing off the vacuous assemblage of stereotypes that often pass as characters as soon as possible. In Jug Face we actually come to care about them.
We might also find ourselves having some small understanding of what motivates this community. They’re capable of horrendous acts of violence (including sacrifices and brutal punishment by public flogging) and and like all religious zealots blindly do the bidding of their “god”with no thought as to whether what they’re doing is actually right or wrong, though to be fair, in this case it seems easier to simply go along with the pit’s demands rather than face the consequences of heresy. But Kinkle fleshes out their fears, the desperation of heir isolated lives and their increasing helplessness as their deity turns against them so that we start to see that they’re only acting out of self-preservation. There’s no condoning a lot of what they do but they’re a better sketched community than the usual motley crew of inbred cannibal psychos (when word gets out about Ada and Jessaby’s relationship the community is as shocked and appalled as any other would be) you get in this sort of thing.
Carter is particularly good as Ada, living constantly in fear of absolutely everything, from her fundamentalist parents to the pit’s wrath to having her guilty secret revealed. She’s not rebelling because it looks good in the script and will appeal to a young demographic, she’s rebelling because she panicked, made a couple of terrible mistakes and is struggling to find a way to dig herself out of the mess. No matter what she does, she’s hampered by a terrible sense of inevitability – “the pit wants what it wants” and there’s nothing she can do to escape her fate. Death is ever-present in her community but all she does by trying to escape her fate is ensure that more people die than is really necessary.
There’s talk that the community is ultimately doomed. They aren’t breeding fast enough to keep up with the demands of whatever it is that’s lurking in the pit. Eilen (Jennifer Spriggs), Ada’s prospective sister-in-law, suggests that the village needs at least five new children just to keep going as they are and is almost immediately eviscerated by the pit creature, almost as if merely mentioning the hopelessness of their situation is enough to incur its wrath. Throughout there’s a sense that things are coming to an end, that the days are numbered for both the community and their god. The events of the climax do little to suggest that the local apocalypse has been averted, merely that a way has been found to put it off or another month. The pit heals the sick but only so that potential victims can be preserved for later sacrifice and it’s hard to see exactly what the community is getting from this very one-sided relationship.
Christopher Heinrich low-key photography and Sean Spillane’s excellent, guitar-heavy score add to the effectiveness of a film that manages to wrong foot viewers at every turn. It’s not the slasher the title might suggest and it then turns out not to be the simple “hicksploitation” film that the first few minutes might suggest. We could, perhaps, have done without the supernatural shenanigans with the shunned boy as there’s enough going on here to hold the attention anyway but it’s a minor quibble. Jug Face isn’t a film for those seeking fast-moving thrills – though there are a few splashes of gore here and there – but should more than compensate those looking for something a bit off the beaten track. Just don’t let that title put you off.
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