"KEEP BUSTIN'."

The Seasoning House

(Warning: this movie is about disturbing shit, and I’m going to describe what it’s about)

THE SEASONING HOUSE is a very dark thriller from the UK circa 2012. How very dark? Well, it takes place in “BALKANS, 1996” and it’s about a mute girl whose family got killed in front of her and she’s forced to work in a brothel for war criminals. Not as a prostitute – the boss thinks the birthmark on her face makes her wrong for that, so she’s sort of like his assistant. Her job is to go around to the poor girls tied to beds, shoot them up and fingerpaint makeup on them.

It’s fucked up, man! And the light at the end of the tunnel that caused me to give this one a shot is the promise of “brutal revenge” on the box. Revenge is never righteous, but in movies I tend to enjoy it, despite not liking the muck you have to get through in order to make the comeuppance seem deserved.

The first shot is a dark, dirty room, and a couple tiny little fingers poke out of a vent in the wall. The vent opens and then a hand comes out, and then the girl that it belongs to. This is Angel (Rosie Day, IRONCLAD: BATTLE FOR BLOOD). The boss, Viktor (Kevin Howarth, GALLOWWALKERS) has taken a special liking to her – or whatever you want to call something like that when it’s an abducted war orphan forced into slavery – and seems to sincerely think that some day they’ll retire from pimping and live happily ever after together. So she’s been around and left alone long enough to figure out how to climb through the vents, between the walls and floors. Though not how to escape. Escape is impossible she explains when she meets another girl who knows how to sign.

I considered giving up. It’s so fucking grim and for a while you’re stuck in this dank, grimy house where you know these grunting soldier assholes are there to rape children. So many dudes in leather jackets with long, slicked back hair and Eastern European accents like interchangeable villains of Seagal’s early DTV era. The only time you’re allowed out into the open air is for the flashbacks, which are even worse – ethnic cleansers gunning down crying mothers in front of their children. Horrible.

Also, the special effects in this movie are fucked up! Right at the beginning Viktor slits a random girl’s throat in front of the others and the filmatists do it digitally so they can unflinchingly show the knife going in and out. There will be many more graphic stabbings like this, and they’re hard to look at even though the rest will be on guys who sorely deserve it. If you could go back in time and show movies like this to the people who were flipping out over SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT their hearts would explode on the spot.

And just as I most feared you see some guy’s naked ass bobbing up and down on top of a young abductee. And the worst stuff isn’t what you see, but the appalling stuff they describe. Poor Angel watches from inside the vent while a guy is so rough on her friend that they have to call in a medic. But it’s okay, Viktor says, because “He pays extra.”

The turn is not so much a plan as a final straw. A group of men show up who Angel recognizes as the militia who killed her family and gave her to Viktor. And again she has to watch as a big bald muscle guy (Ryan Oliva, GREEN STREET 3: NEVER BACK DOWN) has his way with her friend, finally killing her. And now she has had enough.

This may be a pointless review because I don’t know who’s going to read this description and say “This sounds like a way to spend my evening.” But I hung in there and there was a pay off. The fight that she has with this guy – I mean, I can’t recommend this to most people. But as far as those movies that take you to the depths of depravity go, it’s well executed. This guy is naked and she’s graphically stabbing him, puts a hole through his cheek, maybe a lung. And he’s stumbling and wheezing and puking, slamming her agains the wall. It’s a struggle. It’s a cat against a German Shepherd. But the cat wins.

She gets to make a run for it through a few different weird settings, chased by the despicable Goran (Sean Pertwee, SOLDIER, DOG SOLDIERS, EQUILIBRIUM). I was reminded slightly of that movie RUNNING SCARED during a weird episode where she seeks sanctuary with a woman (Anna Walton, Princess Nuala from HELLBOY II) in a little cottage. She’s an interesting character with some layers to her. I didn’t really understand why she collects things with pigs on them, but it’s a nice weird touch that results in piggy banks being bashed over heads.

Day is very good in a difficult role for such a young person, and it’s inspirational to see her character triumph. It doesn’t have to pretend to be a true story like EDEN did for us to know that this type of ugliness does exist in the world, and want to see the innocent overcome it. For me sometimes there’s something cathartic about a story like this, a tiny flicker of light in a vast darkness, a character who has been through so much and up against people so bad, and she’s small and presumably helpless but she fights and she survives and she claws her way out. If Angel can get out of this then you can make it to the weekend, my friend, I promise you.

Director/co-writer Paul Hyett is a veteran makeup effects guy who worked on THE DESCENT, HARRY BROWN, ATTACK THE BLOCK and BLITZ. This is his directing debut, but he later did a werewolf movie called HOWL, which also has Day and Pertwee in it. He scripted with fellow makeup artist Conal Palmer and Adrien Rigelsford based on an idea by Helen Solomon (still photography, HARD MEN).

I have to tell you, there’s a 15 minute making of featurette on here and it’s nothing groundbreaking but I am so glad I watched it because it made me feel much better about the movie. You get to see the men playing sleazy hairy assholes seeming like nice, supportive co-workers. You get to see that there are many women on set, including a fight coordinator who demonstrates all the fight moves to them (must be either Ruth Cooper-Brown or Rachel Bown-Williams of the company Rc-Annie). And you get to see the young women laughing and having fun in between shots where they’re, for example, crying and stabbing a naked rapist, or falling face first into maggot-infested corpses and then puking. Obviously I knew IT’S ONLY A MOVIE IT’S ONLY A MOVIE IT’S ONLY A MOVIE, but this makes it look like it wasn’t even miserable to make.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2018 at 10:47 am and is filed under Reviews, Thriller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

18 Responses to “The Seasoning House”

  1. I liked HOWL. Had a different take on werewolf tropes (True, it just combined them with zombie/vampire tropes, but I think it still counts as different) and it had a fun tone without being too light to work as horror. I never would have guessed that the director started out with some heavy, rub-your-nose-in-shit shit like this.

    I’m with you, Vern, I’m not gonna say I enjoy real nasty, repugnant shit like this, especially when there’s sexual violence involved, but I recognize that it’s usually a necessary ingredient of the hardcore revenge subgenre. You want your tasty vengeance dessert, but first you gotta eat your trauma vegetables or it’s just empty calories. Conversely, all punishment and no payback means the meal leaves you hungry. Or something. Point is, catharsis requires pain. Essence of storytelling, really.

    Anyway, you describe a very challenging watch but you also describe what sounds like some very satisfying revenge beats, so I still might have to check it out.

  2. Very rough movie for sure. Right up there with your “I Spit on Your Graves” and whatnot. This movie might have some of the most gut churning stabbing effects in it I’ve seen other than perhaps a couple of the effects in Laid to Rest. Didn’t realize the same guy did Howl. That was definitely one of the better werewolf flicks I’ve seen. VERY different tone than this one.

  3. I’m surprised to hear that there are “serious” actors like Sean Pertwee in it. This sounds (and the poster looks) more like one of those d-grade amateur shit movies, that try to stick out with really nasty violence and shit, but have nothing else to offer.

  4. Maybe it’s me, but when the director is clearly more into the offence than the revenge I lose interest.

  5. This sounds like a fun-filled movie for some light-watching before I go into work. I once watch I SAW THE DEVIL before going into work one time. That was an idea that was not good.

    pegs: Leave Rob Zombie alone!!

  6. *Just for clarification since this the Internet and I’m sometimes bad at it in real life too, the Rob Zombie thing was a bad joke btw. I have absolutely no ill will against you pegsman.

  7. You will feel my revenge!

  8. In I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE the rape takes up more time than the revenge…

  9. It’s been a few years since I saw this, and I don’t remember being crazy about it, although I thought some of the filmmaking in the early going was at least interesting.

    I think my main takeaway was that it’s not really worth having your face rubbed in so much filth and degradation for the payoff to end up being a pretty standard, kinda average thriller. I wasn’t really offended or disturbed, per se (I’m fairly jaded and hard to shock at this point), but that doesn’t mean I enjoy watching this sort of thing, either. And if you’re gonna really go for it with the extreme content, you gotta Gaspar Noe me and really fuck my shit up with some amazing, eye-popping style or something.

  10. Paul Hyett is a friend of mine … met him in Romania on the set of WEREWOLF: THE BEAST AMONG US, and I remember him telling me about this movie he was planning to make, which turned out to be THE SEASONING HOUSE. When he made it, he sent me the film to watch and I convinced Fangoria to publish an article about the film. It was an incredibly difficult movie to watch AND to write about. I wanted to take a very subjective view of the movie, and discussing the subject matter made my job a significant challenge. I’ll forward Paul your review, Vern. I think he’ll appreciate it.

  11. How does this compare to A Serbian Film? That movie was so bleak that I couldn’t help but laugh at the very, very end of the movie. A Serbian Film is so rediculous and over the top that I couldn’t even feel disturbed. Just couldn’t believe it exists.

  12. That is the difference between good film making and the desire to shock. Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS made bigger waves i 1971 than Nishimura’s TOKYO GORE POLICE did in 2008.

  13. I would also point out that TOKYO GORE POLICE is out to have as much fun as possible and excels in latex effects and trope exaggeration rather than, I dunno, social commentary or whatever it is that people who like STRAW DOGS get out of STRAW DOGS. But I mean, you’re not really trying to compare the two movies so maybe it’s an unfair observation :)

    (the best “look at what animals people are when you strip off the veneer of civilization” is THE WAGES OF FEAR if you were wondering)

    The making-of footage Vern describes at the end of the review made me think of a legend I heard about SALO wherein Pasolini took a photo of the whole cast together smiling and giving the thumbs up to be shown after the film proper, to say “hey man it’s just a movie, we all were friends and had fun pretending chocolate was poop” and stuff……BUT THEN decided not to include it because he didn’t want to give us any sort of safety net. Fucked up, man.

  14. Bad examples, I know. My brain isn’t always firing on all sylinders after a handful of beers…

  15. Henry Swanson's my name

    February 18th, 2018 at 6:46 pm

    This film is perfect for those double feature nights where you are looking for something to watch after ROAD HOUSE or BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE. But bad joke aside, I am somehow drawn to morbid films about human suffering, especially in isolated / captured scenarios (more the semi-realistic kind, rather than the high-concept torture porn variety). Anyone here see CHAINED (from 2012, directed by Jennifer Lynch)? That was a hard one to get through but quite compelling…

  16. Surprised the featurette would focus on what a rollicking good time everybody had during the filming. I’d have expected a movie about such a grim period of recent history, and especially grim sexual abuses therein, would want to be seen as serious commentary, and frame its “making of” documentary accordingly. Maybe I’m just getting more squeamish about movies that wallow in base human behaviour. I remember the days when folk would write passionate defences of their right to enjoy violent rape dramas, not for the revenge, but for the actual rapes, on the basis that … yeah … it’s only a movie. I don’t know if that kind of viewpoint pops up quite so much nowadays.

  17. I’m sure it does, but mostly in alt-right reddit threats, ending with “Don’t be so PC, bro!”

  18. Thanks, I think I’ll pass. Jeesh.

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