Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Natalie Whittle, Adam Burch, John J. Pistone, Mindy Montavon
Intro:
… when everyone starts shaking hands across the divide and gets to taking down masked assailants, the film really picks up and those looking for blood will be rewarded.
Following a surprising number of Airbnb themed horrors, including Alex Garland’s Men, Richard Bates Jnr’s Killer Instinct (aka Tone Deaf), Brandon Christensen’s Superhost and more recently Zach Creggar’s Barbarian, This Land continues the argument that sometimes you shouldn’t risk your life for a bargain.
Directed by Richard Greenwood Jnr and written by Leon Langford and Collin Watts, the film starts with the brutal assault on pregnant Ava Owens (Natalie Whittle) on the 4th of July. Rushed off to hospital, her husband Neil (Adam Burch) is asked to decide whether to risk her life in order to save their unborn daughter.
This Land catches up with the Owens a year later, with Ava, Neil and their only child Dakota (Jerod Powers) going for a holiday weekend in the woods to escape the previous horrors.
When they get there, they’re surprised to find out that the rental has been double booked to The Moss family, including dad Grady (John J. Pistone), mum Barb (Mindy Montavon) and daughter Reagan (Taylor Joree Scorse). The Mosses are more than happy to share the property for the weekend, so no problem, eh? Catch is, the Owens are Democrats and the Mosses are staunch Republicans.
It’s here that Greenwood Jnr leans a little too heavily on stereotypes. Grady, with his love of guns, a voice like Foghorn Leghorn and laughing at the idea of ‘social justice’, is painted in broad red state brush strokes. Meanwhile, Daddy Democrat Neil smokes pot, has an aversion to violence and wants tighter gun control. Ava and Barb – and their kids – seem to fare better, feeling more like rounded people who would rather keep politics on the backburner so that everyone can enjoy themselves.
Throughout all this, the director and his writers leave large clues that everything is not right in the property that the families are sharing/squabbling in; full of foreboding clues like a cellar filled with masks and capes and pictures of cultists on the wall. There’s the suggestion that the families are so caught up in each other’s political identity that they’re not seeing the wood for the trees; the greater evil so to speak.
Even without the title’s reference to Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’, everything is clearly one big allegory of America’s political divide. Hell, when the cultists do finally show up, it’s hinted that they sacrifice people every four years and do so by making their victims fight each other to the death in order to be saved by those above them.
Like a lot of the diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing in the film, the cultists’ agenda is a bit too on the nose. Additionally, the families’ verbal spats go on just a bit too long before This Land remembers that it’s a horror movie and the bodies start to pile up. That said, when everyone starts shaking hands across the divide and gets to taking down masked assailants, the film really picks up and those looking for blood will be rewarded. It’s just a shame that we have to wait so long before it happens.
