The Orphan Killer is a 2011 film from writer/director Matt Farnsworth. This film gets an inordinate amount of love on the twittersphere(I will never forgive myself for saying that word) so I decided to check it out myself. A friend of mine had a copy on DVD and pretty much begged me to keep it when I asked him if I could borrow it for a review. Not off to a good start.
After a home invasion results in the murder of their parents, Aubrey and Marcus are sent to live in a Catholic Orphanage. Aubrey is eventually adopted and Marcus, who is mentally scarred is not. After suffering repeated abuse at the hands of the nuns Marcus is eventually masked and exiled. From this point on it was a struggle to finish the movie.
One of my pet peeves is when people use “Religion is evil” in such an overt way. To me, including Religion in your film for the sole purpose of denigrating it is lazy writing and is no longer interesting to watch. There has to be a balance. The Last Will And Testament of Rosalind Leigh uses the religious upbringing of the main character and the almost insane devotion of his mother as a nice frame to the story, but it balances it by spelling out that she was more or less involved in a cult.
The gore was good for a low budget film so it has that going for it, but I couldn’t get past the clunky and completely unoriginal narrative. I didn’t find there was anything special about the Directing or even the acting.
I’m very big into the Score of a movie setting and maintaining the tone and that didn’t live up either. It was an amateurish mix of almost stock sounding music. I could almost swear that I’d heard some of the songs elsewhere.
If you pay attention to twitter at all, or even do a quick search for The Orphan Killer, you’d swear that this movie was the second coming of Halloween. I’ve seen this movie called everything from “Brave” and “Risk taking” to “The future of slasher movies.”
If the future of slasher films is an amateurish clichéd mess then maybe it’s time to finally let the slasher sub-genre of horror die a merciful death.