Pollyanna McIntosh makes an impression as THE WOMAN, a follow-up to 2009’s OFFSPRING.
son Brian (Zach Rand), who gleefully mimics his father’s thoughtlessly callous treatment of women. Brian is the horrific offspring of this sequel, the spiri- tual replacement for the expired cannibal kids from the prior film. He ignores a young girl who is being pushed around at a party, tosses a lit cigarette butt onto the woman, watches his father hav- ing his way with their unlikely guest, and tortures her with needle-nose pliers during one of the film’s more abrasive se- quences. Credit young actor Rand for creating a chilling char- acter here—he’s an unforgettable brand of evil youth.
The theme of the ruthless adolescent runs rampant through the work of Jack Ketchum—ie., the skirt-chasing Ray Pye (Marc Senter) of THE LOST (2006), the Chandler boys from THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (2007), Danny McCormack (Noel Fisher) in RED (2008), and especially Brian in THE WOMAN. Violent behavior makes these young men feel like they possess some real power,
as Pye explicitly states in THE LOST. With role models such as RED’s Michael McCormack (Tom Sizemore), THE GIRL NEXT DOOR’s beer-mashing Ruth Chandler (Blanche Baker) and THE WOMAN’s Cleek set- ting the tone for young Ameri- cans, the net-net of these Ketchum-based films is the un- leashing of the woman, who ul- timately lashes out against a society that permits an unfair sys- tem of masculine control to go unchecked. THE WOMAN works under the assumption that a cul- ture dominated by abusive males is not sustainable; good-hearted young women like THE GIRL NEXT DOOR’s Meg Loughlin (Blythe Auffarth) give way to an emboldened woman who does not weaken from even the cruelest of physical abuse. This Blu-ray edition of THE
WOMAN provides a lot of visual appeal, however unattractive at times, and the DTS-HD Master Audio pumps up a very credible soundtrack, courtesy of Sean Spillane. The subtitles that
explained tribal speech patterns in OFFSPRING are welcome in their absence from this sequel; McIntosh’s performance is no- ticeably more menacing without the translation. As one might expect, “The Making of THE WOMAN” (25m 29s) is attentive to the effects work of Alan Tuskes. The site of the fruit cellar’s construction comes as quite a surprise: a school gym- nasium in Turner Falls, Massa- chusetts serves as an adequate substitute for a Hollywood sound- stage according to McKee, who did not want lens choices and camera positions to be con- strained by the realities of an actual underground location. Further supplements include deleted scenes (5m 44s) that provide further evidence of Raton’s concern for Peggy, the animated short ¡MI BURRO! (6m 37s), the song “Dis- tracted” by Spillane, and trail- ers for ATROCIOUS (2010), PHASE 7, RAMMBOCK: BERLIN UNDEAD, YELLOWBRICKROAD, and CHOP.
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