THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. In an Oregon courthouse on April 21, 2015, Susan Monica was convicted of murdering two men. Both victims had been hands on Monica’s farm, and it was there where they died; to dispose of the evidence, she dismembered their corpses and fed the pieces to her pigs. For these crimes, she’s currently serving a minimum 50-year sentence. All of that is true!
If you squint, you can sort of see a bit of Monica’s story in Adam Ray Fair’s Piglady. It’s a sporadically creepy movie when it aims for true-crime detail. For example, there’s a scene where the eponymous pig lady (Sandra Dee Tryon) brings on a middle-aged, drug-addicted hand named Randy (Jeffery Hunter) to help around her shambles of a pig farm. She rewards his good work by doping Randy up and then strapping him to a bed to do god knows what with him. If this depravity is meant to illuminate how broken the mind of the pig-lady killer is, I can’t say exactly. What she does makes the scene creepy, not necessarily why she does it.
Yeah, Piglady isn’t a pleasant watch; go figure. The scene I just described is the one moment where Fair establishes an aura of genuine unease, nudging this closer to the skeezy rural slasher I’m sure he thought he was making all along. And while I’m fine — even happy! — watching a low-budget filmmaker toy around with sleaze and torment, this isn’t a particularly riveting example of how it’s done. Once we leave the house of the piglady, Fair twists all his otherwise solid story set-up into a meandering and vague curlicue of directionless schlock. He’s on the precipice of doing something mildly interesting with the material; he just doesn’t know how to realize it.
Monica’s story might have made an engrossing, low-key thriller, but those film rights were probably expensive. Cranking out small-budget horror movies means not asking for more money than the project could potentially bring back as a return. So the Susan Monica murder saga is more of a prompt from which Fair can improvise all sorts of gross stuff. He applies only the most basic facts of the case to what is decidedly a hacky boobs-and-slaughter show — likely to avoid any possible litigation, the true hallmark of any mid-effort exploitation junk.
Piglady follows Brittany (Alicia Karami) as she embarks on a Christmas vacation with Adrianna (Karri Davis), her boyfriend Hunter (Fair, inserting himself as a hyper-competent former Marine hunk), and Adrianna’s sidepiece, Tony (Liam Watkins). These four don’t seem to like or even tolerate each other; they bicker endlessly, only to occasionally pivot to sub-bawdy humor (“The Shocker” gets a shout), which makes you wonder what kind of melodrama will pop off in the Oregonian cabin where the rest of the movie takes place. (Apparently, Fair shot this near Monica’s actual murder farm, though I cannot tell you why.)
We find out Brittany is hiding a seemingly unwanted pregnancy from Hunter. This information feels important because Fair reveals it after a prolonged opening sequence where the piglady kills a young woman who’s just given birth on her farm. Much later, we see the baby in the piglady’s care, though why the baby is a part of this, I couldn’t say — it has nothing to do with Brittany; in fact, It doesn’t have much to do with anything. There’s also the strange inclusion of Adrianna’s vegan diet, and while you may think this character detail is designed to scrape up against Hunter’s studly plans to butcher a pig for their holiday feast, you’d only be partially right. Drama is nigh, only it ain’t.
Fair does a halfway admirable job setting up this pack of ding-dongs for the butchering to come — especially the dopey couple Adrianna and Tony, the latter of whom recites “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by reading the verses off his phone for no serious reason other than to do it. But Fair’s follow-through sucks; Adrianna’s veganism says nothing about pig farming or Hunter’s zeal for fresh-killed meat, and Brittany’s pregnancy only exists because it makes us think that’ll give her enough plot armor to become Piglady’s Final Girl. Through her confrontation with the killer, we might be able to divine a theme from all this chaos. That’s how most movies work, right? Not Piglady.
Not for nothing, Piglady delivers what it sells on the poster: there is a lady who sure owns a lot of pigs. The bonus, such as it is, is watching her pets go whole hog on her victims. We never quite get a good idea of who she is (we don’t even see her face) or why she goes on this killing spree, but the Piglady is there, often seen lurking around the woods with a machete clutched in her mitts. She eventually puts her blade to work on these hapless chumps, with some extra side characters tossed in haphazardly to pump up the body count. A pizza delivery guy gets it embedded in his skull at one point. I suppose, by definition, that makes this a slasher. But “slasher” implies a semblance of well-calibrated shocks, and Fair’s execution is too mushy. I’m going to start calling these kinds of duds “slushers.”
1.5 out of 10
Piglady hits VOD on August 22. You can pre-order it on Amazon Prime Video now.
Written and directed by Adam Ray Fair.
Starring Alicia Karami, Jeffery Hunter, Alex C. Johnson, Karri Davis, Liam Watkins, Sandra Dee Tryon, Shyvhan Storm, and Geno Romo.
Produced by Alex C. Johnson.
Not rated. Contains the requisite amount of blood, body bits, and breasts.
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