A young woman is dick-torn for fun, impregnated by her brother, and sells herself to lies to survive inside a backwoods cult. Director and writer Chad Crawford Kinkle uses his noteworthy script to drop Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) and us into a normal looking pit. Funny thing though, the pit is a chamber of God’s vengeance, which would be unimaginable if it didn’t define the common American “You’re not a Christian, so you’re against us!” mentality.
You heard me. Jug Face is a brutal take from the 70′s horror-mold, and set in a place we’ve all heard of but never been to. Pink Floyd referred to its populace as us versus them, and Salem burned witches for less. Ada’s reaction to losing her virginity and getting knocked-up seems correct at first. She lives without any connection to the outside world and her abusive mother, Loriss (Sean Young) performs random underwear checks, as though she were a drug-addict on hourly probation in Afghanistan, to make sure her cycles will guarantee her future husband a baby. This cult has no money, so they demand stock.
Are you of that ilk? Do you believe that religion has lost its fragility in the modern world? Kinkle sure as hell doesn’t. His modern fable is a gut punch that looms like a colossus over both the pussy-media that masquerades as reality in FOX NEWS and those after-midnight televangelists. All at once, Kinkle removes the television controller and forces the viewer from the safety of the couch (TBN), Hollywood schlock (Moses), and satire (Red State).
As a result, when Ada’s reality turns into a vexatious landmine that blows the harsh dominion out of Nietzsche’s very humanistic “will to power,” you bleed with Ada, share in the cult’s laws, and witness the deranged scorn and punishment from a sinister God that demands worship and praise, regardless. Even though the lesson of the dramatic fable wisely skips over the cheap scares and all too common gross-out kills usually found in all modern horror films, the wounds it carves are beyond healing.
Those that find refuge by aiding Ada’s “sin” do so out of love. It’s too bad, because had they access to the internet or a library, then they could have read about the Descartian “evil trickster” model of God and escaped. In addition, the role of each in this community assures either prosperity or damnation. It mostly depends on whether your face appears on the random jugs forged behind the sheds, an allusion to Zeus’s ancient castings of humans.
Can you really worship and follow something blindly without considering the possibility that it is evil? Sure, it’s a long-winded way to get to the universe-balancing act known as karma but, if Jesus, born from wedlock, gets a pass while uneducated folk must transcend to heaven through a needle’s eye, then we’re all headed for the pit. And, if you buy into that latter scenario, then FOX NEWS has your brain. Jug Face is here to resurrect you.
