Crew
Director – George Bessudo, Screenplay – Daniel P. Coughlin & Jason Hice, Story – Daniel P. Coughlin, Producers – Todd Chamberlain, Mike Karkeh & Paul Seng, Photography – Tim Hudson, Music – Mark Petrie, Visual Effects – Mechnology (Supervisor – Stephen Lebed), Makeup Effects – Drac Studios, LLC (Supervisor – Chris Gallagher), Production Design – Antony DeQuin. Production Company – Alliance Group Entertainment.
Cast
Jamie Allan Allman (Scarlet), William Lee Scott (Chad), Steven Weber (Samael), Kelly Hu (Lilith), Nick Heyman (Alal), Jack Donner (Dark One/Dr. Miller), Sam Sarpong (Jonas), Drew Sidora (Rebecca)
Plot
Husband and wife Chad and Scarlet set out from San Diego to relocate in Seattle in an attempt to get over the death of their child. However, Chad goes to sleep at the wheel and they crash into a telephone junction along a rural stretch of road. They go to a nearby farmhouse to ask for help and are invited in by the friendly farmer Samael and his wife Lilith. Samael says he will take them to town to get a tow in the morning and offers them dinner and to spend the night. However, in the middle of the night, both of them are made prisoner in the barn where Samael and Lilith proceed to torture them.
Farmhouse sets out with a cliché start-up. Young couple set out to head to a location but their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. It’s a set-up that has worked for any number of films – The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Children of the Corn (1984) and U Turn (1997) to Rattlesnake (2019). There is the sinister farmhouse where residents Steven Weber and Kelly Hu ominously have Biblical-sounding names like Samael and Lilith, while Kelly Hu’s sultry wife seems to make come-ons to husband William Lee Scott after he peeks in through a crack in the door on her and Steven Weber having sex. It feels as though it could easily be a lead-in for a modern Folk Horror film.
However, around the 35-minute mark, Farmhouse makes an abrupt dogleg turn into full on Torture Porn territory. This was all the rage following the hits of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), which both pushed the depiction of grisly tortures on screen to a maximum. For several years after, we had a bunch of copycat films with people imprisoned and being tortured with the gore and nastiness wound up to extremes. Farmhouse is certainly a good deal tamer than the extremes that most of these went to – merely Jamie Allan Allman being drowned in a contraption that dunks her head under water and a couple of scenes that have Weber gouging out deafmute Nick Heyman’s eye and Kelly Hu using a cheese grater on William Lee Scott’s legs. Steven Weber, an actor who mostly known for his comedy roles, certainly relishes the part.
What pushes Farmhouse over from the forgettable to the ridiculous is the inclusion of a twist ending where the film heads into full M. Night Shyamalan Conceptual Reversal Twist territory. [PLOT SPOILERS]. There were a host of films that came out after Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) borrowing his Dead All Along twist – they were so numerous I have given them the name the Deathdream twist. Served up again here with a heavy dose of fire and brimstone damnation, it causes the film to collapse into absurdity.
Farmhouse was the second film for director George Bessudo, who had previously made Lake Dead (2007). Subsequently, Bessudo has only directed episodes of the anthologies The Witching (2016) and Conspiracy World (2020).
Trailer here