Monsterfucking The most that neither is an ordinary bearded resident of the American rural hinterland, a sweet and kind provincial Mark Fisher on not the best day of his unassuming life was kidnapped by aliens, who, of course, did not suffer from good intentions towards the human race, and Mark - in particular, having spent a lot of various exercises and experiments on him at all his sadistic pleasure. Returning to earth, Mark changed, starting with a chainsaw and other barbed-cutting arsenal to commit active murders.
For the first time widely presented in the framework of horror film festivals in Toronto, Canada and Sitges, the full-length debut of the American director and screenwriter Joe Begos, the film “Almost a Man” in 2013, despite the obvious extreme low-budget and a certain touch of non-trivial authorship potential, awarded limited film distribution, seeks at all costs, albeit with varying success, to decipher the usual genre paradigms and combinations, spawning something innovative and interesting within the framework of a modern horror cinema. However, “Almost a Man” is rather not a full-fledged application in the genre, but a kind of student experience, not devoid of a specific charm and certain artistic finds at the level of plot design, atmospheric component and directorial finds, which are very inventive, given the scanty budget with Begos’ apparent desire to avoid artisanalism.
“Almost a man” is a picture in which elements of purely fantastic, suprarealistic, turning human life into a syllogic set of fateful episodes, strange accidents, the creation of a malicious will of an otherworldly character, and elements of catchy realism are combined. Starting as a fantastic movie, a kind of extrapolation of many plots about an alien abduction, played out this time against the background of the dull Rednekovsky existence of the central characters, a movie in which everything is emphasized conditionally, “Almost a Man” after some short time transforms into a classic slasher in its construction, a bloody and unstoppable story of a completely crazy maniac who kills right and left.
And the seemingly transparent reason for such insanity on the part of the director is perceived as nothing more than bait, for Joe Begos is not interested in the essence of alien evil, but in the essence of the evil of the intrahuman, which only the venerable kidnappers awakened, became his catharsis, saturating the thirst for blood deep in Mark with the necessary force. The one in whom evil used to sleep became its instrument and embodiment, but this evil, realized in the cramped corners of a small American province, is not as large-scale and by no means catastrophically destructive as it may seem. After all, Mark is still a man, or rather almost a man, and therefore nothing human is still alien to him. So there is a certain and absolutely not ephemeral hope for the restoration of the average reputation, when everything returns to normal, blood and flesh are washed off the guns, the victims will be forgotten and the so-desired salvation of a deeply vicious limited soul will occur.
There's a tart ironic taste in Joe Begos' film. And this irony turns the picture “Almost a Man” into a kind of horror parable about the ordinary madness of an ordinary citizen whose life was gray, dim, uninteresting and devoid of bright colors. But in order to know all its charms, he had to become a victim, and then he himself gave birth to more than a dozen of the same victims, guilty only of his inner limitations. And life sparkled, not from confetti, but from bloody streams and streams. But it seems that Mark Fisher was not fully human before this incident, and therefore the notion of habitual humanity does not apply to him. The awakened terror returned home.