Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Michael Lombardi, Marc Menchaca, Joseph Gatt, Katie Kelly
Intro:
...a wonderfully sick and twisted freak-ride...
The push around the new horror flick The Retaliators is largely and sensibly being driven by the film’s heavy metal and musical connections, with its soundtrack boasting hitters like Five Finger Death Punch, The Hu, Papa Roach, Ice Nine Kills, Nikki Sixx and more, with the likes of Tommy Lee, Jacoby Shaddix, Zoltan Bathory and Ivan L. Moody appearing in the film itself. In a crowded market, it’s a neat hook on which to snare possible viewers, but there’s more than enough real meat on show in The Retaliators to happily make such a hard-sell fun but not wholly necessary.
Why? Because this new film from co-directors and frequent music video helmers Samuel Gonzalez Jr. and Bridget Smith, and debut writers The Geare Brothers, is the most absolutely inspired and eye-poppingly enjoyable slab of nut-baggery since Panos Cosmatos unleashed the magisterial Mandy upon the world. Reverberating with echoes of everything from Rob Zombie, Straw Dogs and Evil Dead through to Todd Browning’s Freaks and Eli Roth’s Hostel, but with an energy and sense of cathartic chaos all its own, The Retaliators is a wonderfully sick and twisted freak-ride that jumps around stylistically while still somehow remaining wholly coherent.
Kicking off with a bizarre, apparently supernaturally inflected backwoods kill-scene that suggests a film-to-come filled with bloody Cabin Fever hijinks, The Retaliators then flips into a dark, sad tale of anguished family grief as young pastor Bishop (the excellent Michael Lombardi, best known as the dim witted Mike Silletti on the cracking TV series Rescue Me) comes apart at the seams when his teenage daughter is murdered after witnessing the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. But with the arrival of cop-on-the-case Detective Jed Sawyer (a truly great performance from Marc Menchaca from Ozark, The Outsider and The Sinner), The Retaliators then ingeniously pulls off a dazzling gear change, and becomes something else altogether…and something very good indeed.
With a rock-solid, cheer-worthy hero in Michael Lombardi’s Bishop, a truly terrifying horde of bad guys (with Joseph Gatt’s hulking brute gangster the most unforgettable), some tasty cameos (Robert Knepper is wonderfully menacing, and Clerks’ Brian O’Halloran and Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix are surprisingly effective, but Tommy Lee’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it drop-by is wholly inconsequential), and a frenetic, beautifully over-the-top finale that really goes there, The Retaliators is inventively gruesome, punch-packing horror at its lurid, feverish best.
