Father Anubis' Hounds: Jackals (2017)

Jackals (2017)
Rating: **
Starring: Deborah Kara Unger, Stephen Dorff, Johnathon Schaech

Looking back at notorious groups and communities started by the likes of Charles Manson, Jim Jones or that one bald Heaven's Gate guy who believes aliens will save everyone's souls via suicide, one can agree that brainwashed cults are pretty terrifying for the lengths they do to show their devotion, which is nothing short of an obvious reason why cult-themed horror flicks are still a staple to this day, albeit in varying quality in terms of scares, thrills and seriousness. Among all of them, though, how many ever tried tackling the subject of deprogramming a cult member?

Set in the 1980s, Jackals (2017) starts with a cold opening of someone's point-of-view, quietly breaking into a house and entering the sleeping owners' room to steal some cash. The intruder, finding a pair of scissors, then proceeds to snip a few strands of hair from the sleeping couple, only for both of them to wake up and prompting the intruder to stab them to death. Now with a need to satisfy their bloodlust, the intruder next enters the couple's daughter's room, only for her (and us) to realize that the murderous figure is her brother; this, sadly, did little to save her from being strangled to death by her own kin.

One credit sequence later, we watch another family waiting in a backwoods cabin for someone to bring back a teenage boy. Their teenage boy. That someone is Jimmy, a military-trained "deprogrammer" who's supposed to have the skills to undo brainwashing, something the family needs right now as the estranged son, Justin, joined a notorious murder cult.

Now for Jimmy, kidnapping and drugging Justin before driving him back to the cabin is the easy part. To deprogram him, however, proves to be a challenge as not only is the boy utterly convinced that his real family (as in the cult) is out there, but his real "real" family isn't all that functional themselves; through the course of the movie, it shows that Mr. and Mrs. Powell separated after one of them was caught cheating, Justin's brother Campbell has a short temper, and Justin knocked up his girlfriend Samantha, who is now taking care their baby girl, Zoe. Their situation worsens, unfortunately, when the cult itself decided to show up and surround the cabin, intent getting their "brother" back and killing those responsible for taking him away from them.

See, I like this concept. Perhaps there are already films tackling cult deprogramming before Jackals (2017) but this one is a first for me and I love the fact that it's even one bit slasher flick and another bit siege movie. One can imagine an intense psychological mind game between the deprogrammer and the cultist, while a family fights off a murderous group from the plot alone but, perhaps, I was expecting too much.

Sadly, while the psychological aspects are there in the film's flow, the directions Jackals (2017) took made some of the outcomes wasteful, predictable and borderline boring. Without giving away much, let's just say that a supposedly important player in the cast gets killed off too soon (and not so spectacularly, if I may add), leaving the rest of the family to deal with the brainwashing matter on their own. Perhaps it's the movie's attempt to toy with the audience's hopes that the drama within this dysfunctional group would chip into the psyche of their son and somehow reverse whatever bullshit he's conditioned into believing. But, seeing how everyone in this bunch treats one another so poorly throughout the story, the repeating failures of their attempts are painfully unsurprising and it could have been done so much better.

Curiously, instead of crowding around the house and simply using their number to muscle their way in to get their "brother", the cult leader would rather intimidate the family into handing the teen over by sending out his underlings one by one (or by a small group) to siege the cabin and kill whoever gets in the way. Nice approach, but the murders can get tame and whatever action they got going are pretty forgetful.

In turn, the slasher antics aren't anywhere as good as the opening act, and the siege scenes could have been more, what's the word? Perfectly timed? For me, what made movies like The Strangers (2009) or Them (2006) work is that their suspense has build-up; we get to know the characters and their situation first before the movie creeps up the scares and shocks until its chaotic climax. Jackals (2017), on the other hand, reveals the full extent of what the family is dealing with way too early into the plot, throwing away opportunities to grow an empathetic or cathartic hook for the doomed victims.

So I've been negative about Jackals (2017) so far, is there anything I enjoyed about it? Welp, apart from the cool-looking "Father" and his animal-masked flock of killers, and that one scene involving an unfortunate soul hiding underneath the cult's cars, not a lot really; the acting feels stone cold for a whole lot of the run, as if the casts aren't even that invested in the story. Most of the script is technically just our family pleading and begging Justin to remember and just snap out of it. Plus, the ending looks like as if nobody knew how to finish this damn movie and just cliffhangers everything. I want to believe Jackals (2017) would have been a fairly fun ride if it was handled differently, but truth be told, it is what it is now, a poorly paced and directed backwoods slasher-siege-cult monstrosity, and there's nothing much I can do but move on and see the next 2017 horror offering that I might enjoy. Perhaps another cult-related movie with a talking doll and Jennifer Tilly...

Bodycount:
1 female stabbed on the throat with scissors
1 male stabbed with scissors
1 female strangled
1 male brained to death
1 male bled to death from a gutted belly
1 male strangled to death
1 male dropped to his death
1 male hacked with a pickaxe
1 female had her throat slashed with a knife
1 repeatedly stabbed, hacked with an axe
1 male dies from shock (?)
Total: 11

(Y'know, it suddenly occurred to me: why exactly did the family have to do this in the middle of the woods? I mean, surely, a more crowded area like a town or a city would do, right? Heck, since this involves a cult member, why not drive all the way back to a town, convince a priest to borrow the church for one or several nights and just do the deprogramming there?

Or why didn't Mr. Jimmy brought along some help in case things go South and sour real fast? I mean, heck, I'm sure a couple of army buddies would love to kill off a cult member or two in case they decided to pop up...

Missed opportunities!)