I have to put a bit of a disclaimer here, before I begin. The film I’ll be reviewing here is a deeply disturbing, very true to life study of a subject not often discussed in film. It is completely deserving of far more analysis than I am prepared to give it. The thing of it is, I had put off watching Cravings for as long as I could because of the box art. I’m not ashamed at all to admit that. And the reason I’m not at all ashamed to admit it is, just fucking look at it. If there were an award for shitty box art, Cravings is where my money would be.
Here’s the rub: Cravings, doesn’t exist. Go ahead, check IMDB for a movie called Cravings from 2009. I’ll wait. Now since you didn’t take the 24 seconds to go about doing it, I’ll just clear it up now. At the top of the list for title results, you’ll see a flick from 2006 called Daddy’s Girl. Click that. That’s the movie Lionsgate’s selling to unsuspecting customers with that Sci-Fi Channel CGI vampire mouth on the cover. On the back of the box, it details with a troubling lack of clarity how Nina, “A troubled teen,” has to “Confront her immortality and twisted bloodlust, trapped in a place of neither the living nor dead.”
There are no vampires in this movie.
Looking at it from a purveyor-consumer standpoint, and not to sound melodramatic, but there would just be no way to make it economically feasible to market the film as the movie it is. To give even a broad generalization of how unbelievably fucked this puppy is would be to drive away 90% of anyone who picks it up off the shelf. But honest to God, and don’t think me juvenile when I say this: I can’t imagine anyone giving serious thought to paying for the Cravings DVD as it’s being offered. I have to hold on to the belief that people are inherently smart enough to put a movie that looks this shitty back on the shelf and walk away. This is a retitled flick Lionsgate has been sitting on for over three years, and they’re charging a $26.98 MSRP for a standard-def disc with no extras whatsoever. That’s more than they’re charging for the outstanding new Blu-ray of the perfectly average slasher flick See No Evil. Besides the obvious format issue, the main problem with this strategy is See No Evil looks pretty damn cool from the cover. There’s Kane, with goddamn horns on his dome, looking like he’s gonna rip your fucking arms off if you look at him cross. And here we are, looking at Cravings – a movie that not only looks worse from the packaging than any other flick in the store, but that you wouldn’t even be able to research if you had a computer open in front of you. It’s a sham.
If you haven’t guessed it, no, I’m not going to tell you what Daddy’s Girl is about. I’m in a position where there’s so little known by anyone about the movie that saying anything at all about the plot would come across as a globe-shattering spoiler. I’d even go so far as to call it one of the best genre debuts of the last ten years. I think if anyone with some money in their pocket checks this out on a whim, writer/director DJ Evans will be getting a pretty immediate ring. But suffice it to say that as much as the film surprised, shocked, even occasionally moved me, I cannot with any level of conviction expect anyone to pay what Lionsgate is asking. The opinion of one critic is hardly ever taken seriously enough to encourage a blind buy from the average consumer. And when you stack on top of that the astronomical price point, lack of any information on the film being readily accessible, and box art you’d be ashamed to have on your shelf, it gets to the point where my reviewing the disc seems almost completely fruitless. If a single person reads this and buys it out of curiosity, I’ll be personally honored. Such an investment of funds and blind trust would be one of the better compliments of my recent life. Take heed though, that everyone’s opinion is different, and there’s just as much chance you won’t like it as there is with any other slow burn horror film of this sort. It starts out not being an easy film to watch, and rather quickly spirals into a flat-out fever dream. And no, I’m really not going to tell you the plot.
The film deserves an 8 or 9, and the disc deserves a 3, thanks to decent picture quality and some 5.1 action. I’m very glad to have a film like this I can revisit in the future, as it truly is effective in its concept and in its execution. I encourage anyone reading this to pick up the disc once it drops to a third of the price, around this time next month. I can’t realistically expect anything greater from anyone reading this. Hell, even Lionsgate left the original Daddy’s Girl title at the end of it, seemingly conscious that anyone who bought the damn thing and stayed with it till the end deserved to be rewarded. Or maybe they just didn’t notice or care.
DVD Bonus Features
Trailers for several mediocre-looking slasher flicks. The case also lists English and Spanish subtitles as special features, as well as the “Widescreen presentation.” For 27 dollars it’d better be in widescreen.
"Cravings" is on sale August 4, 2009 and is rated R. Horror. Written and directed by DJ Evans. Starring Jaime Winstone, Louise Delamere, Richard Harrington.
