Pig Hill
It’s not always been easy for Carrie Owens but she is determined to make the best of her life, not only for herself but for others, putting aside her own problems, her marriage to Ben crumbling and the substance issues of her brother Chris, to volunteer at a women’s shelter and research a book about the missing women of Pig Hill, ten of them in the last decade and four in the last year alone, “their voices and experiences crying out for acknowledgement.”
Recently divorced and returned to his hometown of Meadville, Pennsylvania, a chance encounter with Andy Korn brings some light to her life, or at least shared grief, his parents fading and his son having died in a freak accident, he half-jokingly suggests Pig Hill may be tied with his own interests in alien abductions, but two incidents mean any respite is short-lived, a death at the shelter, Paula killing herself and her baby, and Ben’s suicide, Chris saying it was because he found out about her new friendship.
Adapted from Nancy Williams’ supernatural thriller Pig by Jarrod Burris, Pig Hill is directed by Kevin Lewis of Willy’s Wonderland, starring Rainey Qualley as Carrie, Shane West as Andy, Shiloh Fernandez as Chris, apologising profusely for skimming his sister’s medication yet making no effort to change his behaviour, Jeff Monahan as Reggie, the well-meaning but ostracised town drunk, and R A Mihailoff as the menacing Marvin “Red” Davis.
A pig farmer who blew up his trailer cooking meth and Carrie’s prime suspect in the multiple missing women and possibly the abuse of his own daughter Paula, her deformed child indicating inbreeding, despite his known record the police vacillate between indifferent and incompetent forcing Carrie to recruit Andy as her sidekick in her own investigation, he going along with her half-baked plan to protect her and to spend time with her.
Opening with a blast of noise and flickering light and with the radio antenna looming repeatedly over the town and the film which periodically metamorphoses into nightmarish haze of blood on the tiled bathroom floor and udders and suckling swine, the first half of Pig Hill is a drama of damaged people soldiering on, Carrie hoping that understanding the fate of missing women might give her own struggles meaning, the validation her parents never gave her.
Once the top of the hill is reached, however, it is steeply downhill, the realisation considerably less interesting than the hints of what the crossbreed might be, a degrading generic horror of women abducted, caged and dressed in sackcloth, bruises and blood, abused by masked men and sensational in the execution rather than rigorous in its logistics, the cast in their raw determination better than the sow’s ear they have been asked to approximate into a silk purse.
Pig Hill had its world premiere at FrightFest on Saturday 23rd August
