That's right, the good and the bad because to be perfectly honest with you, I don't know how to parse this review. Everything that happens onscreen can either be explained by saying the director is twisted and brilliant or that he failed miserably by turning in a migraine-inducingly bad film. So I'll just review the whole mess and let you decide whether it's good or bad...it's been about a month that I've been contemplating this movie and I still can't decide how I feel about it. It's a challenge, because this movie is such a trip that there's almost no way for me to say it's either good OR bad because the strange, frenetic pace of the events that unfold seem to defy classification.

Even in the present day, when the sister returns home with her boyfriend for a family Christmas celebration, she still seems to believe she is a powerful witch (and so does her brother and grandmother, since they mention it and she uses a "magical" amulet to perform what looks like a love spell), her mother is a drunken lush whose sexual frustration pours out at inappropriate times, someone is calling and leaving cryptic and vaguely threatening messages on the family's answering machine and sending sketches of clowns to the house (how this is a threat is never explained, but then most things in this movie aren't really explained) the brother is jealous of the sister's boyfriend, there are a bunch of awkward and frightening family relations that make it almost impossible to believe that the boyfriend stayed in the house when most people would have run screaming out of the house after the first night...and on and on it goes.

Writing this I can see that this summary isn't even giving a fitting picture of what watching this movie is like. The brother and sister seem to inhabit this world that isn't quite our reality, where witches and spells and menacing cannibals known as "mid folkers" exist. It's as though they never really outgrew that childhood belief in folklore. But at the same time, we're never really sure if they're being serious or if the whole thing is some bizarre inside joke between the two of them, and if that's the case, it's insane to put the poor boyfriend through this strange sibling bonding ritual while the poor guy has the rest of the crazy family to deal with as well.

And the director puts the audience through it as well, the movie is painfully disorienting, with nauseating swirling camera angles, elevator music soundtrack, and a script that is never quite footed in either fantasy or reality. The movie is advertised as a slasher, but that is patently misleading because apart from a pet rat, there are no killings until the last 20 minutes of the movie, and when they do happen there is never any mystery as to who is doing the killing. In fact, it's almost treated like an afterthought. "Oh, yeah, all these people are slaughtered. Anyway, moving on.." The gore isn't bad considering the movie's small budget, but by this time we've been sitting through almost two hours of disorienting mush, so we're desensitized to the violence. It's almost as if the movie blunts its own impact at every turn. For so long the events have seemed to straddle the fence between fantasy and reality without bothering to clarify for us which is which that we're unsure if anything we're seeing is even happening.

It could all be some bad acid trip (and that's the perfect description for how the movie looks...like a collection of strange blurry images associated with a bad acid trip). We never know if anything is real so we never really connect with the characters, and thus when the ending finally comes it seems like a cop out because it doesn't capitalize on either the fantasy OR reality of the situation. The ending seems to take the position that the killer was crazy and everyone else was normal and the audience cries foul, because we've sat through 2 hours of painful family relations that clearly demonstrate that everyone but the boyfriend was completely insane from the beginning of the movie.

And that makes it hard to connect with any of the characters, they're all so insane and annoying that we don't want to sympathize with them, and then the ending of the movie seems to be telling us that they were just a little eccentric and we should feel sorry for them but I just don't. I find a lot to like about the movie, it's enthralling as I found myself unable to turn away from what was happening on the screen my head was spinning and I was enjoying being thrown off-kilter by the events of the movie so eventually I stopped trying to figure out what was happening and just enjoyed the ride, and the brutality is very well done when the massacre finally happens, but the movie can't decide what it wants to be, and that feels like a major let-down after all the effort we put forth in wading through the movie in the first place.