"The Pit Wants What it Wants" - A Review of Jug Face (2013)

Jug Face was recently recommended to me by my brother, and based on the title alone I had to check it out. Of course, in my mind, it was going to be the story of the titular character Jug Face, a deformed creature who runs around wearing some kind of milk jug mask. It wasn't, and that's OK. The point being, I went into it completely blind and with no expectation whatsoever.

So what is Jug Face all about? Well, in a word, faith. Absolute blind faith.

A clan of backwoods dwellers worship and answer to a cylindrical pit in the forest. The pit demands blood, and the "seer" (Sean Bridgers) unconsciously conjures the next victim by sculpting his or her likeness out of clay and baking it into a jug in the kiln, thus the "jug face." All's well in the world of the pit bleeders until a young woman named Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter), who's pregnant with her brother's child (another weird and icky touch), finds out she's next to be sacrificed to the pit. Then things go all to hell.

The pit claims another.

It's a cool concept, for sure. The whole thing felt something like Pumpkin Head meets The Wicker Man. The title sequence, which presents the history of the pit and its sacrifices through child like chalk images, had me pretty much sold from the beginning. Plus, I'll hand it to the writer/director, a guy I've never heard of named Chad Crawford Kinkle, for being able to create and maintain a creepy atmosphere surrounding the bizarre family dynamic at play. But, the film had a couple of shortcomings that, unfortunately, keep it from being wholly immersing and living up to its full potential.

It's the effects. Specifically two things: the appearance of the "shunned boy," a wraith of sorts that Ada can see and who warns her of the pit's intentions, and the "trance" like state that Ada goes into, during which she can see the creature from the pit tearing its victims to shreds. These both rely heavily on CGI, which is something the rest of the film succeeds marvelously in forgoing. And... it's kind of, like, crappy CGI. I understand that this was probably filmed on a shoestring budget, but even cheap make-up effects would've been preferable to the cheesy "aura of black" that floats around the shunned boy. Not to mention his digitally altered spooky ghost voice. It came off as a half-hearted throwback to the imagery of movies like The Ring and The Grudge, which I'll admit were never my cup of tea anyway. As such, it just made many of the sequences seem incongruous, and, frankly, outside the world Jug Face had created.

Eh, kinda weak. Plus he looks like Michael Cera.

There's a fantastically low-key ending that, I predict, as many viewers will love as will hate. I personally thought it was great. It's not quite enough to make us forget being pulled out of the experience by certain sequences throughout, but I'd say it's enough to make me want to keep an eye out for Chad Crawford Kinkle in the future. Besides having a pretty kick-ass name, he obviously has a talent for crafting a good horror story. I'm interested in where he'll go next.