The Horseman

The Horseman was the first film I saw at the 2009 Frightfest, this cutting edge Australian thriller echoes back to the likes of movies 8mm and Hardcore. With a unique vision, and a slightly dated look Horsemen is a compelling and dark look at the underground pornography industry.

Christian (Peter Marshall) is struggling to come to grips with the death of his daughter from a drug overdose. He finds it hard to deal with the fact that his angel followed many others down the path of drug addiction. One day in the post he receives a package that turns his heart to stone. The package is a pornographic video-tape and to his horror the video contains an orgy scene featuring his daughter. Christian begins to realise that the drug overdose and the video could be connected and sets about exacting his revenge on those that were there on the day his daughter made a porn movie, the last day of her life.

Horseman is a pretty dark and relentless story, designed to make the viewer flinch. Its opening scenes feature a fairly brutal beating of a man who aided in the distribution of the videotapes. The movies director Steven Kastrissios wants you to know that he is not going to put kid gloves on to tell this very tragic tale. As Christian executes his revenge on the man, you realise that the words sorry are not going to be enough to appease this aggrieved father.

The ability to make the viewer squirm is the directors ultimate weapon, from savage beatings to nasty testicle attacks he is trying to make certainly the male viewers think a bit more carefully than they may have, by literally hitting them where it hurts. As Christian makes his way through the distribution chain to the filmmakers there is never a moment to get relief from the brutality he delivers to his victims.

Sadly one of the only things the director does deliver is shock and awe, because the story is not quite as solid as the violence. Horseman is an overly long, drawn out and ill planned affair that’s only real saving grace is that it reaches back into already trodden terrain, and that is with the similarities to the two movies I mentioned at the start. These films about girls dragged into the pornography industry via circumstance have only one of two outcomes, and we have seen both before; worse still this time round you know the movies outcome from the very offset.

Horseman tries to tread too heavily in the realms of conspiracy, when Christian is nearing the end of his mission the director focuses on the conspiracy element, showing that the man behind the thing is so well connected he even has the police in his pocket. It’s at this point that all the good work of the previous hour goes a bit wrong.  Behind the whole situation is a sinister and scary individual (rather like 8mm), and this character comes complete with a whole load of henchmen, and a seemingly endless supply of people to help find his pockets in his female market operation. It all just becomes too big for the small confines of the movie, and a little tedious.

One of the nicest touches of the movie is you have to kind of wonder when its set, as in what place in time. As you watch the film you immediately think that its set in the past chiefly by the fact that the porn movie comes on videotape. Later however you see a couple of fairly recent looking mobile phones. And just as you think you have a grasp of the fact that this is meant to be set now, in this day and age; the curveball of the ten year (possibly more) old computers that you see all over the movie, and at no point (well not that I caught) any mention of the internet. I spent possibly far too much time focusing on where in time the movie was set.

While Horseman was a great and gritty start for a day of graphic horror movies (I refer to the Frightfest film festival) it lacked quite a lot, and copied from a number of places. Most importantly the running time was overlong, allowing you to get a little too much self pity for Christian, and Alice (Caroline Marohasy) a young woman he meets while travelling between killings, a young woman who has her own tragic side story. Its an entertaining enough movie, but one I’d not relish seeing again.