Bill Paxton's nightmarish thriller Frailty is classic horror.
Before films like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street perverted the genre, psychological horror films were a Hollywood staple. They attracted some of the industry's best directors and biggest stars. Charles Laughton's 1955 Night of the Hunter gave Robert Mitchum one of his most unforgettable roles as a demented religious fanatic.
William Castle directed an aging Joan Crawford to one of her most chilling performances in 1964's Strait-Jacket as an axe-murderess who may not have been as rehabilitated as her doctors at the asylum believed. Crawford and Bette Davis were terrifyingly believable in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is still one of the finest examples of these unnerving explorations of warped minds and unspeakable deeds.
In Frailty, opening in town today, Paxton plays a mechanic in a small Texas town who claims to have had a vision one night in which an angel tells him he has been chosen to rid his community of demons. The demons lurk in the bodies of seemingly normal people, but Paxton's mechanic, known only as Meiks, will know them and their hideous crimes when he touches them.
When he finds a demon, Meiks must decapitate it and bury the body in the memorial park behind his home.
The big catch, and the one that makes Frailty so much more disturbing, is that the widowed Meiks has two young sons and they are to be his accomplices.
The story is told through flashbacks.
It's the present and Texas is being terrorized by a serial killer known as the God's Hand Killer. FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), who heads the investigation is visited one night by a mysterious man who calls himself Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) and claims his brother Adam (Levi Kreis) is the God's Hand Killer. Fenton says he will show Doyle not only where Adam's victims are buried but also where their father's victims have lain all these years.
Naturally it's a dark and stormy night when Doyle and Fenton set out alone for the memorial park. On the way, Fenton tells Doyle the story of his troubled past and present.
The young Fenton is played by Matthew O'Leary, with Jeremy Sumpter playing little Adam. Paxton, who also directed the film, has coaxed the kind of subdued, honest performances from O'Leary and Sumpter that make the proceedings seem all the more real, frightening and sickening.
Paxton himself is genuinely scary as he swings back and forth between loving, nurturing father to axe-wielding avenger.
This is not a movie for the squeamish or the sensitive. It's classic horror, plain and simple, meant to unsettle and unnerve.
And it does - big time - so be warned.
(More on: Frailty).
(This film is rated AA)
More Movie Reviews
