A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother (but that doesn't necessarily go both ways)

One of the biggest compliments I can give a film is to say that it made me want to seek out more by the people it involved. This is how I felt after watching Simon Rumley’s brutal Red White & Blue. I had problems with the film, but was nevertheless fascinated by his storytelling both on the page and the screen. 

Hence, when Netflix flashed the naughty little red warning that Rumley’s previous feature, The Living and the Dead, was leaving Instant Watch, I hopped to it.

Quick Plot: James (28 Days Later and The Fall’s Leo Bill) is a sheltered young man coping with serious schizophrenia. He lives in an old school mansion with his wealthy, but soon-to-be bankrupt father, his bedridden mother, and a few pieces of furniture that barely fill out the floor. It's a sad, small family facing disaster on several fronts and when Pops goes out of town, James seizes the chance to prove his independence by locking out the hired nurse and tending to his ill mother on his own.

Things, as you might expect, do not go well. James doesn't really understand what it means to be a caretaker, as evidenced by his thought process that if taking your pills helps make you feel better, taking them ALL AT ONCE should be the cure. The second act of The Living and the Dead is excruciating in an incredibly raw way, as James, for all his good intentions, puts his poor helpless mother through true hell.

Rumley also explored the relationship between a son and his ailing mother in Red White & Blue, and much like that film, that is the ultimate strength of The Living and the Dead. James isn't a bad guy. "I like people!" he tells his father, who replies with something truly heartbreaking: "Yes son, but they don't like you." Like Marc Senter's Franki, James hurts his mother when trying his best to save her. It's as sad as it is terrifying to watch.

Where I fell a little out of the film (and it should be said, where other reviews seem to think it shines) is during James’ more extreme descent into madness. Rumley pulls out a batch of tricks to try to put us into the mind of a schizophrenic, and while I have no idea how accurately the condition is portrayed here, I personally felt it was a tad too artificially constructed. The sudden mix of aggressive sounds and shaky camera angles came off more as a filmmaking tool than character point of view and it frustratingly took me out of a story that I had previously been fully invested in.

This isn't to shortchange the film, as some of the other posts I've read about it praise Rumley's use of style. If you’ll allow me a Gene Siskel moment, the issue I had was that at a certain point, I just wanted Rumley to follow a different story than what he’d planned. It’s still a unique and deeply effective film well worth a serious watch, particularly for its strong performances and hauntingly unusual imagery.

High Points

The austere mansion goes far in honing the atmosphere of The Living and the Dead, as the family’s surroundings come off as a tragic old school aristocracy slowly eroding with their current state. Wide open rooms are littered with a random artifact and no real personality from the people that actually live there, creating an empty shell of a home for an empty shell of a family

Low Points

As explained earlier, the extreme camera tricks didn’t work for me, perhaps because the more human narrative was just fine on its own

Lessons Learned

Only one, and trust me, that’s enough: the importance of those “I’m Falling And I Can’t Get Up” button things simply cannot be overemphasized

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Living and the Dead just left Netflix Instant Watch, but I’d still recommend a rental if the premise sounds like something you’re interested in. It’s a sad watch, but one made with innovation and, odd to say, heart. Based on this and Red White & Blue, it seems that Simon Rumley is one of the genre’s more interesting new talents, a filmmaker with a strong eye, interesting handle on style, and most importantly, a lot to say and explore. 

In Honor of Flag Day, Let's Do This:

So here’s the thing: I can’t really discuss today’s feature, 2010’s Red White & Blue without revealing a major plot point that emerges nearly one hour in. If you haven’t seen the film--and I do recommend it, providing you ‘enjoy’ similarly mean and complex horror along the lines of Jack Ketchum--then I would urge you to admire this photo of an adorable puppy carrying an American flag--

And now leave.


All others, here goes:


Quick Plot: Erica (a hauntingly straightforward Amanda Fuller) works menial manual labor jobs during the day while prowling cheap bars when the sun goes down. With white cowgirl boots riding high, the pretty enough redhead beds a man (or three) each night, never repeating herself or lingering for a morning spooning. She mysteriously draws the line (and closes her legs) at Nate, a war veteran and former interrogator now slumming away at a hardware store and boarding house.

Nate is played by British actor Noah Taylor, something you might not believe until IMDB tells you so. With a wiry black beard and loaded Texas drawl, the actor formerly known (to me) as Charlie Bucket’s dad or the Exposition Deliverer in Vanilla Sky disappears into the role of a self-aware sociopath with a mushy soft spot for the cold Erica.

A hesitant courtship follows, cutting off just at a point where it seems our mismatched would-be lovers might get serious. The film switches to the point-of-view of Frankie (The Lost’s Marc Senter), an almost maybe kinda successful rocker balancing a busboy job with his band’s upcoming tour and mother’s cancer treatment. The switch is odd, but not unreasonable; we should remember Frankie as one of the three men who picked up Erica in the opening scene.

In case you didn’t read my intro or decided to take a gamble (much like a few key characters in Red White & Blue), I’m about to get spoilery. Walk away kids. Walk. A. Way.

Frankie gets some bad news in the form of an HIV positive diagnosis, a double whammy since he’s been donating blood to his mother. He concludes--and we an the audience can *almost* be sure--that his one night of unprotected sex with Erica is to blame. Upon dragging her to his basement, it’s more or less confirmed. Erica was raped as a young girl and has essentially spent her life apathetically spreading her disease to any male irresponsible enough to blow his chances on a few hours of condomless sex with a stranger.

What to make of that? What Erica is doing is akin to murder, something made all the more powerful when we see the snowball effects that poisons Frankie’s innocent mother (wonderfully played by Sally Jackson). At the same time, Frankie made his own choice, playing Russian Roulette with his penis. It’s a risk people are taking every day.


Oh but the film doesn’t end there. Come now, this has been dubbed one of the more disturbing films of the year for very different reasons than moral quandaries. Frankie holds onto Erica for a night, creepily seducing her and making a doomed marriage proposal. It does not end well.


Once Nate discovers Erica’s fate, things get...bad. Families are slaughtered. New uses for deadly duct tape are discovered. Stab wounds juiced. It’s ugly. It’s senseless. It’s a nihilistic roller coaster that ends with pure hell.

Hugging your pound puppy yet? Feel like you learned anything about humanity, America, sexual responsibility or vengeance? I can’t say that I have. Part of me wants to roll my eyes at Red White & Blue’s pretentiousness, balk at its self-important title and passive aggressive attempt at linking everything from the Iraq War to revenge-fueled beheadings.

Red White & Blue IS pretentious, but it’s also quite fascinating as both a film and moral question asker. The three lead actors are excellent, giving vanity-free and layered performances that don’t let their characters off the hook. Though the score occasionally oversteps its place, it’s generally well-done with a sound entirely of its own. I don’t quite know how Red White & Blue was supposed to make me feel, but during its running time, I didn’t want to think about anything else and now that it’s over, it’s still there. While that's not necessarily the sign of an enjoyable film, it does make it worth watching for a certain type of viewer.


High Points
Credit must also go to the look of the film, in particular, its actual characters. Fuller is an attractive young actress, but the film is smart enough to let her look natural, patchy skin and all. It’s refreshing to believe our characters as real people, something too many films are too terrified to try

Low Points
As I said, the soundtrack does become a tad obtrusive at times


Lessons Learned
Never send a diner burger back to a Texas kitchen


When bound to a chair with your family’s life hanging in your voice, listen to the crazed war veteran asking you questions and for goodness sake, answer them 

Condoms people. Condoms.


Rent/Bury/Buy
Red White & Blue is currently streaming on Neflix and is certainly worth a thoughtful viewing, providing you enjoy complicated and brutal horror that tries to/might be socially important. I’m still not entirely sure where I fall, but I’m glad I watched the film and look forward to eventually revisiting it with a director commentary track. It does make me curious to seek out filmmaker Simon Rumley’s other work, including the also-Instant Watch The Living and the Dead. I like his ambition and directorial guts.


Now let's forget our problems with another helping of flag puppies: