Getting indie reviews is awesome, well, most of the time. Instead of having to sit through Hollywood’s generic superhero movie number 34, you never know what you’re going to get with an indie movie.
I also love how Hollywood has to stick to the ‘rules’; it’s got to be sellable, it’s got to appeal to the fans, it’s got to be good. OK, so they miss the last one, but it makes most big movies stale.
Indie movies, on the other hand, make whatever they like. For example, Piglet, the horror version of the beloved character. You won’t see Disney making it, in fact, Disney most likely hate it, but there’s nothing they can do. Ha!
There are two indie movies I’m reviewing today, one is terrible, and the other is interesting. We’ll start on the bad.
Piglet
I will say it, but I was a fan of Pooh: Blood & Honey. It was a well-produced, fun slasher, and it was made with a little bit of heart. It wasn’t just a churned-out horror movie for the sake of it.
Piglet, on the other hand, is very much a churned-out horror for the sake of it! It’s terrible, even for an indie movie.
The Story
This piglet has nothing to do with Pooh, Disney, or the 100 Acre Wood. The killer is called Piglet because he finds a Piglet mask, the same one you can find in any costume shop. He puts on the mask and kills people. If he had found a Michael Myers mask, this would have led to a lawsuit from John Carpenter.
We meet him as he’s being transported by the police to jail. The road they are on is in the middle of the woods, like most police routes for dangerous criminals. One of the guards needs to pee, so they stop in the middle of the scary woods.
To urinate, the guard has to put on headphones and music. This is because his bladder needs soothing music, and not so that Piglet can escape and kill his co-workers. I don’t know about you, but I can’t squeeze out a drop of pee unless I’m listening to Taylor Swift.
Piglet escapes, and then we find him, chained up in a basement. The guy who has him chained up gets people to stay at his cabin, and Piglet kills them, and they both eat them. How did they meet and end up like this? No idea, it’s just not explained.
It’s also not explained how people seem to book a cabin in the woods, disappear, and then it never gets investigated by anyone. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I can figure out that if people seem to go missing at this cabin, there’s probably something about the cabin.
Slasher Paint-by-Numbers
The rest of this indie movie is a paint-by-numbers slasher movie. Young girls, young couples, they all get picked off one by one. You know who the main protagonist is; they make it, everyone else doesn’t.
There’s nothing else really to say about this, apart from the gaping plot holes. If I were to guess, a lot of the plot holes are because of time restrictions, and no one is looking at the overall story. Even for an indie movie, this was bad.
Overall
The best thing for Piglet would be to take him to a butcher’s shop and make him into sausages and a nice bacon sandwich. Since Piglet is a cannibal, he would be OK about becoming part of the food chain.
There are brief boobs, but they are as fake as the story. There’s nothing here to hold your attention. I am giving Piglet half a star, though, as I still like the idea of giving the middle finger to Disney.
Cannibal Mukbang
When I first heard about this, my eyes rolled as it sounded like cheese, in the purest form. However, I asked for a screener and put it on. To my pleasant surprise, this was really good.
Cannibal Mukbang stars April Consalo and Nate Wise. Aimee Kuge is the writer and director. Firstly, to explain, a mukbang is ‘an online broadcast, where someone eats as much as they can’. The word is Korean, where it’s a popular thing to have young ladies do it for simps.
The Story
Cannibal Mukbang is an indie love story… bear with me. Mark (Wise) is lonely, socially awkward, and suffers from insomnia. One restless night, he goes to the local mini-mart and meets Ash (Consalo), who then happens to hit him with her car.
A friendship starts to build, and Mark learns that Ash does mukbang for a living. It’s a bit odd, but nothing completely unusual. That is, until he starts to suspect that she kills people. He then finds out she eats them, which is a little bit worse.
The problem is that it seems eating human flesh seems to make you get more hungry, like you’ve never been before. For Mark, it’s a little too late. He doesn’t know this, but Ash has already started on the road to that hunger.
The Cast
The cast for this indie movie is very good. Mark is the main focus, but everything revolves around Ash. I’ve not seen Consalo before, but I like her in this a lot. Obviously, the biggest issue with Ash’s character is that she’s a cannibal.
I don’t know, I’d still be interested; cute > cannibal. So, she eats a little human flesh, but she’s still a nice person underneath. If she asked me out, I would certainly have to think about it. I’d probably cave quicker than I could say “I’ll have a double belly burger, large fries, and a diet coke…I’m watching my waistline”.
Maybe I’m shallow, maybe I’m desperate, but I found myself falling for Ash. I liked this take on an indie story, it wasn’t about the blood, guts, and gore of cannibalism. So many other movies focus on that, which is a shame. Cannibal Mukbang looks at… how to put it, seemingly the “gentler” side of cannibalism.
Be warned, though, this movie still has more than its fair share of blood, guts, and gore. It’s not for the faint-hearted, it even had me wincing in places.
Overall
Cannibal Mukbang is an interesting indie movie. It’s a clever story, well-acted, and an unusual take on the genre and the topic of cannibalism. I cannot comment. I’ve never tried it. From what I can tell, it’s a bad thing and tastes like chicken.
At one point, I thought they were going to go down the same route as Ravenous, where eating human flesh makes you stronger. Mark sees Ash snap a guy’s arm without much effort. This doesn’t pan out, though, as later, she is easily beaten up by a random person. Shame, this would have made it more interesting.
This movie is obviously not going to be for everyone, but it was something different and something you wouldn’t see mainstream Hollywood touch. There isn’t a superhero in sight. I’m giving this indie movie 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Both Piglet and Cannibal Mukbang are streaming from today.
