Movie: The Loved Ones
Rating:

Prom isn’t always corsages and limos and maybe losing your virginity. Sometimes it’s kidnapping and torture and maybe losing a limb or two. Australian horror film The Loved Ones delves deep into one girl’s absolute effing insanity with regard to the spring-time teenage rite of passage.

The Loved Ones was released in 2009 in Australia and has been racking up rave reviews and film festival awards ever since – a fact which convinced Paramount to pick it up for (limited) American release. Granted, we have no shortage of scary movies here – from torture porn like Saw to sleep-with-the-lights-on fare like Paranormal Activity – but The Loved Ones is apparently much more than that. I can’t exactly say how. It looks pretty torture-y to me.

The Synopsis: Lola (Robin McLeavy) asks Brent (Xavier Samuels) to Prom and when he says no, she is determined to destroy his whole god damn life. She kidnaps him and brings him home where she and her father have decorated their house like a high school dance…from hell. She dresses Brent in a tux, binds him to a chair, carves her initials in his chest, injects bleach into his throat so he can’t talk and nails his feet to the floor when he tries to escape. Just like a real Prom! And that is not even half of what she does to this guy. Trust me when I say that the written plot description I read beforehand was truly horrifying. The trailer leads me to believe this is one seriously disturbing piece of work – so if you are a fan of crapping your pants in terror, you should probably go see The Loved Ones.

The Loved Ones will be released in the U.S. on June 1st.