Wound Movie Review

Written by Ted McCarthy

DVD released by Vicious Circle Films

Wound 01 Wound 02

Written and directed by David Blyth
2010, 77 minutes, Not Rated
DVD released on March 13th, 2012

Starring:
Kate O'Rourke as Susan
Te Kaea Beri as Tanya
Campbell Cooley as Master John
Sandy Lowe as Mistress Ruth

Wound 03 Wound 04

Review:

Wound is one of those movies that raises some important questions. Just not about the movie. The questions are much more pressing, like "How much longer 'til this is over?" and, "Crap, did I remember to buy more cat litter?" It is little more than a hodgepodge of weird imagery involving the same people for an agonizing 77 minutes. By "weird," I don't mean "scary." Hell, I don't even mean "disturbing." It's just weird, and after a very short time it becomes incredibly tedious and annoying.

Susan (Kate O'Rourke), our main character and the one we're supposed to dislike the least, is a mentally unstable (to put it mildly) woman scarred by both incestuous sexual abuse and the loss of her newborn baby when she was fourteen. It is nary seven minutes into the film before she ties her rapist father to a chair, strangles him to death, and shears his penis off (and while it's one of the fakest phalluses since Boogie Nights and geysers watery red paint Tokyo Gore Police-style, it looks positively clinical in comparison to the volcanic vagina that shows up later).*

After Susan disposes of the body (which is never addressed again), and after we see her doing some S&M LARP-ing with Master John (Campbell Cooley) — who seems to be the world's worst therapist — we meet Tanya (Te Kaea Beri), a young girl on the hunt for her birth mother. To no one's surprise that's revealed to be Susan, and soon after their awkward reunion, Susan becomes convinced that Tanya is trying to kill her.

Wound 05 Wound 06

Wound 07 Wound 08

I'm not sure what else to say in terms of story because there really isn't one. We just see a bunch of random weird things happen, some to Susan, some to Tanya. And it's never clear as to what is real and what is just happening in Susan's mind. Like Tanya herself — if she's real, how does Susan just walk away after Tanya cracks her in the back of the head with a shovel and drops her in an open grave? If Tanya is in fact just a product of Susan's psychosis, why are there whole scenes early on of Tanya interacting with other people on her own before even meeting Susan? While these questions and more occurred to me, I didn't care about any of it enough to try to figure it out.

The movie does manage a few semi-creepy moments, such as when Susan is having a telephone conversation with her mother even though we can hear the dial tone on the other end. And there's a bathroom rape involving a tattooed man in a pig mask and spiked collar that's a bit perturbing. But in the end, Wound offers no real resolutions, no reasons to care, and thus, no reasons to bother.

*See Hostel: Part II for slightly better and much more satisfying (in terms of story) dick-chopping.

Wound 09 Wound 10