Main cast: Ry Barrett (Johnny), Andrea Pavlovic (Kris), Cameron Love (Colt), Reece Presley (The Ranger), Liam Leone (Troy), Charlotte Creaghan (Aurora), Lea Rose Sebastianis (Brodie), Sam Roulston (Ehren), Alexander Oliver (Evan), Timothy Paul McCarthy (Chuck), and Lauren-Marie Taylor (The Woman)
Director: Chris Nash

As a long-time horror movie fan, I’ve become very wary of mainstream critics and their praises of films in the genre. Most of them view the genre like it’s really way beneath their notice and they’d rather gargle with sulfuric acid than watch any film voluntarily, so when they do watch one, they act like it’s a revelation. Remember, these are the same people that clapped like seals when they first experience cheap jump scares and slow-motion walks down dark hallways in the early The Conjuring Universe phase, because they are all programmed to view slow motion as award-winning brilliance.

In a Violent Nature is a grotesquely overpraised movie, and I deliberately plan to avoid it… until it is staring at my face at the streaming service screen. Oh, why not. I’ve been under the weather for a few weeks and it’s not like I have anything better to do while stuck in my ‘resting’ phase. Who knows, I may be surprised, and this one may be genuinely brilliant. 

Sadly, this one seems to be getting so much praise either because, like I’ve said, this is the critic’s first time watching a horror movie and is bowled by the experience while not knowing the genre well enough to know any better, or this is another example of manufactured praise common among the hype machine in the movie industry. I’m curious if this is the latter, because this movie is Canadian-made, and I’m not sure that Canadians have that much of a clout with Hollywood. 

Maybe Shudder subsidized the marketing?

I do wonder because this movie is simply not praise-worthy at all. It’s cheaply made, has a bare-bone plot, and boasts so many distracting technical issues like automated dialog replacements (ADRs if one wants to sound smart), janky camera work, and some of the cringiest Troma-tier lighting and acting qualities I’ve been subjected to in a while. 

Basically, the plot is the oh-so-original premise of some idiots taking a locket belonging to Johnny, who goes on a murderous rampage to retrieve it. Johnny’s dead and he’s now a badly made-up dude that is supposed to be a cheap zombie-like thing, but fortunately, the human characters are as stiff and awkward as corpses too, so the whole thing is about 90-minutes of watching rigor mortis in action.

This movie is hailed by some as a satire, but I don’t see any satirical elements here. There are just a few lines of dialogs here so it’s not like one can easily discern any satirical intentions, unless one is completely tripping while watching this movie, I guess. 

Some also call this the scariest movie of the year, if not ever, and I’m really sure they are tripping, because the movie is shot in too-bright lighting to be scary… unless one considers the janky make-up exposed in bright light something scary to behold, I guess. There is no pacing or tension, just the movie lurching slowly and clumsily from one unimaginative scene to another.

Then there are some people that claim this movie is deliberately terrible, hence its charm, but again, unless they know Chris Nash personally, and perhaps they do, there is no way to tell from this clunky and utterly boring waste of time.

Maybe this movie is part of a social experiment to see how easily swayed people are by what they read online to wholesale believe the opinion pushed down their throats, like some real life They Live situation, but nah, I think it’s more probable that Chris Nash and the people at Shudder are spending far more money to generate hype for this pile of poo than they spent making sure the film is actually decent at the very least.