{"id":22805,"date":"2019-09-23T22:01:56","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T12:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=22805"},"modified":"2019-10-23T22:10:02","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T12:10:02","slug":"in-the-tall-grass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=22805","title":{"rendered":"In The Tall Grass"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

Director:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Vicenzo Natali
\nWriter:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Vicenzo Natali, Stephen King
\nCast:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Laysla De Oliviera, Patrick Wilson, Laysla De Oliviera, Avery Witted, Will Buie Jr<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he film begins with siblings Becky and Cal driving to San Diego.\u00a0 Becky is pregnant.\u00a0 They are driving in a remote rural area and stop for a break at an old dilapidated church.\u00a0 Next to the church is a field of tall grass.\u00a0 A voice calls out to Becky and Cal.\u00a0 It’s a traumatised young boy.\u00a0 He says his name is Tobin and he is lost.<\/p>\n

The siblings hem and haw for a second and then decide to help him.\u00a0 They step into the tall grass.<\/p>\n

And that’s where the trouble begins.<\/p>\n

Becky and Cal soon find themselves lost in the tall grass too.\u00a0 They can hear one another but they feel disoriented.\u00a0 One moment they sound metres apart, then they sound miles apart.\u00a0 In the film’s best scene-setting moment, they try jumping up and down with their arms raised to spot one another.\u00a0 They do it once and they’re ten metres apart.\u00a0 They try again the very next second and inexplicably, they’re fifty metres apart.\u00a0 Just what is going on?<\/p>\n

Then, to really ratchet up the stakes, Cal bumps into Tobin who is holding a dead bird.\u00a0 Tobin explains that in the tall grass,\u00a0dead things don’t move<\/em>.\u00a0 Meanwhile Cal bumps into a man named Ross who says he’s Tobin’s father.\u00a0 Can she trust him?<\/p>\n

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

As the story plays out, its clear the film-makers are pulling the rug out from under us.\u00a0 Sure the tall grass is mysterious but really, its the people\u00a0who inhabit it who are the real puzzle.\u00a0\u00a0No one<\/em> is who they initially seem to be.\u00a0 And as day turns to night and desperation begins to set in, we start to see them all for who they really are.<\/p>\n

Quantity is generally not a trait that is much admired in creative industries but some of my\u00a0favourite writers are legendary for their workmanship and astonishing output.\u00a0 Agatha Christie wrote 66 novels, 14 short story compilations, 2 works of non-fiction and a play.\u00a0 Roger Ebert wrote over 10,000 reviews, averaging 300 a year for 40 years.\u00a0 Stephen King, at the age of 72 has 61 novels and 6 works of non-fiction under his belt.\u00a0 And it is one of King’s novellas (co-written with his son Joe Hill) upon which\u00a0In The Tall Grass<\/em> is based.<\/p>\n

King is a wonderful ideas man and in writing such a prolific volume of horror stories he has drawn upon all sorts of material over the years – haunted dogs, haunted cars, haunted toy monkeys, haunted fingers…and with\u00a0In The Tall Grass<\/em>, haunted paddocks.\u00a0 It’s very much b-movie fare obviously, but I enjoy seeing what he does with it.\u00a0 Not everything needs to be\u00a0The Shining<\/em> or\u00a0Shawshank Redemption<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Watching the opening fifteen minutes, In The Tall Grass<\/em> struck a familiar chord with me.\u00a0 The ingeniously claustrophobic and repetitious environment.\u00a0 The unwilling captives.\u00a0 The gradual revealing of each person’s true nature.\u00a0 It reminded me of the wonderful sci-fi horror\u00a0Cube<\/em> [1999].\u00a0 When the credits rolled, I looked it up and sure enough, there he was.\u00a0 Vicenzo Natali.\u00a0 The very same director exactly twenty years later!<\/p>\n

I loved this movie.\u00a0 It hasn’t reviewed particularly well (currently 35% on Rotten Tomatoes) and I think the movie loses most people once it introduces the magic rock and the guys in the tall grass\u00a0start to really go off the rails.\u00a0 But there’s something about Natali’s style and interest in working with this type of cinematic gimmick that really jives with me.<\/p>\n

The horror genre has\u00a0really come back into vogue in recent years and there has been some absolutely stellar films with world class acting in the likes of\u00a0Hereditary, Gerald’s Game<\/em> and\u00a0The Endless<\/em>.\u00a0 But there is plenty of breadth to the horror genre and as someone who used to trawl their local Blockbuster and watch the likes of\u00a0Doctor Giggles<\/em> and\u00a0Chopping Mall<\/em>,\u00a0In The Tall Grass<\/em> is an entertaining if not crude b-movie with a fun hook that reeled me in.\u00a0 Basically, this is my apologetic way of saying I know this is trash, but it’s absolutely my kind of trash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After hearing a young boy’s cry for help, a sister and brother venture into a vast field of tall grass in Kansas but soon discover there may be no way out…and that something evil lurks within.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":22807,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2875,2872,2874,2206,2873,614,2876],"class_list":["post-22805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-avery-witted","tag-joe-hill","tag-laysla-de-oliviera","tag-netflix","tag-patrick-wilson","tag-stephen-king","tag-will-buie-jr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22805"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22815,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22805\/revisions\/22815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}