Bereavement (2010)

It's a lazy Sunday here in the Scream Queen household.  Scream King has brought home a ton of work, and is holed up in the bedroom with noise-canceling headphones on.  I have a huge cross-stitch project to work on, and of course, an endless supply of horror movies to watch.  The reason I heard about Bereavement was actually after watching the trailer for Chained, which is actually next up on my Netflix DVD queue.  Reviews on IMDB compared it to Bereavement, and since the latter is available on Netflix instant, I thought I'd give it a shot while waiting for Chained to arrive.

I was excited to hear Michael Biehn is in this movie.  There's something maniacally sexy about him, kinda like Bill Moseley.  Unfortunately in this movie, he plays an overbearing, annoying uncle, when he would have been much better cast as the serial killer.  It also took me pretty much the whole movie to figure out why this was called Bereavement.  I guess it's because the girl who comes to live with her uncle is grieving her parents.  Or the serial killer is mourning his dad?  I'm not sure.

The plot is, that a girl, Allison (Alexandra Daddario) comes to live with her Uncle Jon (Biehn) and Aunt Karen (Kathryn Miesle) after the death of her parents.  She's not too psyched about having to live with a new family, especially in a boring rural area.  But she soon perks up as she meets William (Nolan Gerard Funk -- what a name!) and starts seeing him.   Overbearing Uncle Jon is not thrilled, but he really should be focusing on the serial murderer living in their midst.

Meanwhile, in a nearby abandoned slaughterhouse, Graham (Brett Rickaby) kidnapped a little boy, Martin (Spencer List) several years prior.  He has spent this time schooling the boy in the wonderful world of torture and murder.  There seems to be some sort of reason that Graham is compelled to kill, but it's never quite explained.  He spends a lot of time talking to a cow head, which seems to be some sort of twisted representation of his deceased father.  There's lots of screaming, stabbing, and killing...and of course, the monologues with the cow skull.

I really didn't think this movie was horrible.  It wasn't great...it was just average.  The cinematography/scenery was beautiful, the storyline was interesting, and the little boy was suitably creepy.  But it just kind of dragged a bit, and there was never really any explanation for the murders, or why the dude felt compelled to teach the kid.  Apparently this is a prequel to the movie Malevolence so I will have to check that out as a follow up.