Schlock Shelf – Wound

May 7th, 2012 | POSTED BY Chad Eng

Wound is an independent horror film from David Blyth that takes the viewer through a sort of sado-masochistic, sexually dysfunctional, mentally disturbed Australian woman’s spiral into bizarro-world. There’s plenty of bodily fluids, yelling, gravedigging, mask-wearing, and gratuitous breasts to satiate the average horror fan, but the plot isn’t linear at all. If you’re planning to see the film, read up online to help you fill in the gaps the film doesn’t divulge…and good luck with THAT.

A car pulls up to a house in what looks like a swamp in Florida. A woman, Sarah, answers the door, and you see her through what looks like a security camera with a time and date stamp. It’s her father come to visit. He complains about America and then the house she lives in, and then she smacks him in the head with a baseball bat. When the guy wakes up, there is his daughter with a mask on getting ready in a mirror. There are lots of dolls everywhere, some candles, and a skull. The woman has her father tied up and he claims that she WANTED him to hurt her when she was a child. Then, she chokes him out with some electrical tape and graphically cuts off his ween with some scissors. Cue lots of fake blood and a fake penis.

Cut to a guy questioning Sarah about something, which quickly turns into a bondage and submission session. The guy is videotaping the whole thing on his computer for some sort of online audience.

Back to Sarah’s house: she’s cleaning up after herself and wheeling a body in a garbage can out to a shallow grave behind her house. She buries her father’s body in the grave with a bunch of things wrapped in aluminum foil. I think they’re baked potatoes—so weird. It looks like she’s buried him next to her mother—assumably, his deceased wife—based on the headstone. But then, the daughter goes inside and calls her mother to talk about how insane she (the daughter) is. After her mother hangs up on her, we find out the aluminum foil packages are filled with poop, from her toilet. Nice.

Scene change to a high school girl, Tanya, talking to her counselor. The counselor is asking about her love life and the girl wants to know if some sort of documents have arrived. The counselor turns over some papers and then tells her there wasn’t a father’s name on her birth certificate. The counselor sounds quite mean. Then, next thing you know we’re in a bondage club with loud house music playing and a guy in a pig mask masturbating quite publicly. The girl goes into the bathroom because she’s freaking out and some guy meets her in there. The guy kisses her and she passes out. All of a sudden, the guy with the pig mask is on top of her pumping away. Again, graphically. Then the girl is awake and the guy that was kissing her in the bathroom lays down on some train tracks with her to die. Must be symbolic, because I don’t get it at all.

Tanya from the train tracks shows up at Sarah’s door. She’s Sarah’s daughter. However, Sarah claims she’s childless. Sarah claims the daughter died before she could hold her, so she’s not having it. The girl ends up leaving and Sarah takes a shower. She’s bruised up, and for some reason she’s bleeding all over the shower. But wait, Tanya hasn’t left. She’s outside the shower door drinking the blood that’s dripping underneath. Really? Tanya then runs out behind the house and finds the grave where the body of her father should have been. The daughter then smacks her mother in the head and drops her in to the shallow grave where her father just was. But somehow Tanya ends up staying with the mother. I’m not sure what happened there.

Susan is at the psychiatrist’s office and he’s prescribing drugs to her for hallucinations. Back to the bondage club with two people being tied back-to-back while wearing masks. There’s all kinds of scenes that don’t make sense at this point. A woman tells a lady (presumably Susan) that her baby didn’t survive. The haggard old dominatrix witch who tells her this has shown up a number of times. Then the daughter and Susan end up together in Susan’s house crying.

She’s flashing back to when she had the child. The haggard old witch is hitting her in the pregnant stomach with a paddle in an attempt to either kill the children or cause an early delivery. Then there’s a grotesquely fake vagina spurting blood and delivering a baby. Or twins actually, played by grownups in masks crawling out of a giant prop vagina.

This is where I started doing some looking on the Internet to find out what the hell this movie is really supposed to be about. When I read the plot from the people who wrote the movie, I got mad. Why do directors/writers think they can piece some scenes together without any sort of flow and then explain what they MEANT to show via a description on the back of a DVD case? Ridiculous. The movie should stand on its own and make sense using only the film itself. Yes, I understand some confusion during a film, but resolution is a wonderful thing that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve wasted two hours of your life. I’d not recommend this film to anyone. Even with the description of the plot, this film made no sense to me and it angers me having to remember any piece of it.

(1 out of 5 fus)

Campbell Cooley, David Blyth, Horror, Kate O'Rourke, Sandy Lowe, Ta Kaea Beri, Wound