{"id":45487,"date":"2024-11-08T16:00:31","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T21:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=45487"},"modified":"2024-11-11T03:24:02","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T08:24:02","slug":"unnatural-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/08\/unnatural-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Unnatural (2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now available on VOD<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a sucker for a good Western. Low budget, a lack of star-power, none of that really bothers me, so long as it hits high on the ol\u2019 Yeehawometer. Likewise, I\u2019m a sucker for a good vampire pic, pun only slightly intended. Mix the two, though, and you usually wind up with more Cookie\u2019s Camp Mush than a Texas T-bone. There have been some decent genre mashups over the years, though- take 2005\u2019s <\/span>The Burrowers<\/span><\/i> as a fine example. So I went into 2024\u2019s <\/span>Unnatural<\/span><\/i> with my breath held, just in case I was wading into undead horse-hockey.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Unnatural<\/span><\/i> (not to be confused with the long-running <\/span>Supernatural<\/span><\/i>) follows the adventures of Dan Remington (not to be confused with Dean Winchester, although I see where you might slip up), played with Rooster Cogburn-esque grit by former WWE\/F \/ ECW wrestler Al Snow. Al Snow\u2019s most memorable gimmick back in the day was carrying around a severed mannequin head named \u201cHead,\u201d that only he could hear speaking. Dan Remington is an aging cowboy surrounded by the ghosts of his loved ones that only <\/span>he<\/span><\/i> can hear, although he can\u2019t see them. These ghosts <\/span>can<\/span><\/i> be seen by his granddaughter, Jessy Remington (Who, I might add, is credited as \u201cJessy Winchester\u201d on IMDB- see, told you it\u2019s easy to do!), played by Charlee Carmicle, who while she can <\/span>see<\/span><\/i> the ghosts, can\u2019t <\/span>hear <\/span><\/i>them. They\u2019re also accompanied by her brother, Junior Remington, played by Samuel Wilson, also semi-affectionately called \u201cTurd\u201d by his grandfather. Junior is gifted with weaponized autism in a form that puts the kid in 2018\u2019s <\/span>The Predator<\/span><\/i> to shame, because he uses his hyper-intelligence to build his grandpa new monster-hunting weapons like silver knuckledusters and frontier-era napalm, although he doesn\u2019t recognize social cues such as knowing when to keep his mouth shut when he\u2019s hiding behind a bar from the bad guys. Oh, and they\u2019re all on a journey to the town of Possum Trot together to find and kill a vampire after the Remington kids\u2019 parents are slaughtered by thankfully ill-lit and briefly seen werewolves, because Grandpa, it turns out, does this kinda thing because he\u2019s on a Mission From God, a la Jake and Joliet Blues, but with much fewer song and dance numbers- sorry, <\/span>Howling VII<\/span><\/i> fans.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0In Possum Trot, they encounter kinda-sorta conflicted former good guy \/ now strangely-sleepy-during-the-day bad guy Sheriff Roddy Hawken, played with way more gusto than he was probably getting paid for by actor John Wells. I\u2019m unfamiliar with Wells, but that\u2019s a shame, because he was pretty good in the role, and I wouldn\u2019t mind seeing him given better scenery to chew. That\u2019s not to say that the scenery was terrible- in fact, the art direction was pretty well done, and the crew turned the town of Possum Trot (Yes, that\u2019s the extremely awesome name of the actual town where this was shot) into\u2026 Western-era Possum Trot very convincingly. In fact, most of the cast itself was pretty convincing, and the film was solidly written by writer Whit Whitman. Unfortunately, <\/span>director<\/span><\/i> Whit Whitman must not have been keeping that close an eye on his cinematographer, as a lot of the shots in the movie were badly-framed, poorly-lit, and even clearly out of focus, ironically. There were even shots which seemed to just\u2026 not be there. Early on in the orphaning werewolf attack, there were plain blank spots that might as well have said \u201cinsert shot here,\u201d as well as one sequence later on which seemed to cut off mid-sentence. And the special effects were\u2026 well, I hate to even use the word \u201cspecial.\u201d They were low-budget, and you can only do so much with spit and bailing wire.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, I have to say that I enjoyed this first outing of the Remington Family, overall. Everybody involved seemed to be having a great deal of fun, and took the whole thing just-seriously-enough for it to be a worthwhile ride. <\/span>Unnatural<\/span><\/i> was well-paced, routinely funny, and had that almost-just-right mix of Horror and Western, for my tastes. In fact, it reminded me a lot of an old-school role playing game called <\/span>Deadlands: The Weird West<\/span><\/i>, which I\u2019m sure Whit Whitman was at least familiar with, as he was both a former writer for former D&D publisher TSR, and the director of 2017\u2019s RPG-themed comedy <\/span>Knights of the Dinner Table<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0I say \u201cfirst outing,\u201d because it turns out that the Remingtons are due back soon in <\/span>Unnatural II: The Gates of Hell. <\/span><\/i>I can only hope that they ride back in with an increased budget, the same brisk, humorous writing, a cast spurred on by the successes of their first outing, and a better technical eye behind the camera. I\u2019ll no doubt be in the saddle for the next rodeo. After all, if you can be mad at a movie with lines like \u201cOr <\/span>maybe<\/span><\/i> the Sheriff is in <\/span>cahoots<\/span><\/i> with the <\/span>vampire!<\/span><\/i>,\u201d then you\u2019re likely riding on the wrong range, friend. My Yeehawometer was sufficiently filled.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now available on VOD I\u2019m a sucker for a good Western. Low budget, a lack of star-power, none of that really bothers me, so long as it hits high on the ol\u2019 Yeehawometer. Likewise, I\u2019m a sucker for a good vampire pic, pun only slightly intended. Mix the two, though, and you usually wind up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[477,1181],"class_list":["post-45487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-horror","tag-werewolf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45488,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45487\/revisions\/45488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}