The Drive-In Ronin - Get Away

Disillusioned with the #MutantFam yet pledged to the Drive-In Oath, one man walks the Earth in search of the Three B’s (Blood, Breasts & Beasts) and the fabled Kung Fu City. His guiding mantra: The Drive-In is everywhere…you just need to look for it.

These are his journeys.

He is…The Drive-In Ronin.

200 years ago, the Swedish island of Svalta under quarantine from a flu epidemic, slowly turned to cannibalism. What the citizens of the island didn’t know is that this “epidemic” was artificially prolonged so that four English traders and the mayor of the island could make themselves rich off local gold. Today, this story lives on in the descendants of those few survivors, ritualized in an annual tradition called Karatan. Enter a vacationing English family of four, hoping to partake in the eight-hour play at the center of this celebration by renting a bed-and-breakfast on the island…none of them suspecting what this commune has in store for them. On Svalta, nothing is as it seems…

While not nearly as invested in The Last Drive-in as I used to be, given the messy break-up between John Brennan and the show, I still have to give Joe Bob his due. He once said on the show that the problem with the horror-comedy genre is that you have to be very precise. You have to hit the horror and have it be effective, but you also have to hit the comedy for it to be funny. And a true horror-comedy is a film that can balance the two. When it’s great, it can balance them effortlessly. Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead is a perfect example of this. I bring up this example because here, we have Get Away, written by one of the stars of Shaun, Nick Frost. Maybe that’s why I ultimately came away from it…disappointed.

I mean, I get what he was going for. It is a parody of the ‘folk horror’ genre. You know the story: unsuspecting outsider or outsiders enter into a small, extremely close knit community that has shunned the ways of the modern world around them and said outsider(s) meet with a grizzly fate: whether it’s a pagan ritual…okay, it’s pretty much always a pagan ritual, but I’m sure there are other forms or antagonists in this type of horror film. I dunno, can’t say I watch too many of these. And maybe that’s it, maybe I don’t get the parody given my lack of experience with the genre. But it felt like so little of the humor hit. To the film’s credit, there was one scene that was dead on though. When the matron of the island community tells the other locals that she wanted to celebrate this Karatan the ‘old way’ one last time, spelling out that this family of Brits was to be killed and eaten. What ensues is a rather civil discussion that is extremely Monty Python-esque. Certainly not guffawing by any stretch, but certainly chuckle worthy and truly hit the parody note that was needed.

The majority of the film though? Ugh. Long-time readers of the site know that I typically need a character or characters that I can identify. Someone to root for. Our family here though is just…mom’s too aggressive and wound tight enough to snap, dad’s the polar opposite and a little to stereotypical British proper and whatnot, the son, for lack of a better term, is a cunt that you kinda want to see these Swedes have their way with. The daughter, played by Maisie Ayers, was the only one that really didn’t feel like a caricature. So, I can’t say I was on board with them at the start. When the big twist comes at around two-thirds of the way through the film, I was even less invested, even though I got the joke trying to be told here.

The townsfolk, recruited from actors local to where the film was shot…oddly enough, Finland and not Sweden, do an excellent job creating the atmosphere of menace that you’d expect in the film and, as some of them start to back away from this cannibalistic plot…as I stated earlier…provide some genuinely funny moments of very dry humor. But that ends up in some ways being a detriment, as when the big twist occurs…meh…you don’t exactly care then either. Credit does need to be given to Eero Milonoff who plays Mats, the local that rented his late mother’s house to this family, as holy fuck is he creepy. Exactly as he needed to be.

This takes us back to my opening though, the film creates a creepy vibe inside the house…but not so much with our commune. They, and the matron especially, are a little too over the top, depriving the film from ever really hitting a horror vibe. Nothing’s truly scary. At no point does anyone truly feel in jeopardy, except for after the big twist and with that, any chance at maintaining any tension or horror atmosphere is gone.

So, the comedy doesn’t hit and the horror doesn’t hit…what does? The gore. The effects team had to have had a blast with this film. I’m not saying there’s Sam Raimi levels of fake blood here, but there was certainly enough to go around. The dismemberments were good and detailed with severed heads looking like the living heads they had once been. There was only one issue: when Nick Frost loses his hand toward the end…the fake arm actually looked good, but Nick did get noticeably wider. It’s an age old problem dating back to whenever someone with two arms has had to portray a character with just one, so it’s not like I can fault the team here at all. And, let’s face it, if the story had done its job and drawn me in and made me invested, I can guarantee that either I wouldn’t have noticed it or would have been very quick to forgive it. Here, it provided an escape to a movie I had already checked out on.

Man…writing this reminds me how much I hate writing negative reviews. Especially since I love Nick Frost’s work. But they can’t all be winners and every star has their albatross. Unfortunately, Get Away proves to be his…well, two of them, since he wrote the script as well. While this might be worth a revisit if or when I immerse myself into the folk horror genre, right now, sadly we don’t have a ‘Disappointed Cat’ rating, but we do have an Angry Cat and, alas, it is warranted here.