Five-Legged Iguana

¡Qué horror! 2012

Candidate # 31

CHAINED

(August 2012)

Now, for those of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.

“But what about his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.

Fine.

The Jennifer Lynch Scorecard:

I wasn’t overly fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena, but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance, so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror! 2009 list.

While I appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still waiting to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production, Despite the Gods.)

And now, we come to Chained.

In the past year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial killer thrillers, Chained stands out because while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing Carl Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply just wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the child’s mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance star, Julia Ormond).

There’s a searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s 94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’ oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.

As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping into the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re witness to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of their motivations.

This is a disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.

Here’s hoping Lynch keeps on keepin’ on…

(Chained OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)