Few genres can swerve like horror. Within the limitless bounds of terror, horror can wield well-trodden moments or even entire other genres like wily diversions and facades: the robbers-on-the-fun first half of From Dusk Till Dawn, the genuine romance of Spring, Predator’s musclebound action heroes gradually realizing they’ve stepped into a sci-fi slasher, and so on. Opening with the familiar beats of stranded victims, mysterious side-road, inhuman ambush and spurting gore, The Retaliators takes such a hard swerve that some might wonder if they’re even watching a horror movie. Oh, they are, and a blood-drenched one at that.
After its grisly and frenetic tease of an opener, directors Samuel Gonzalez Jr. and Bridget Smith settle into a very different tone, introducing the family circle of pastor Bishop (Michael Lombardi) and his daughters. With Bishop established as a man of faith more than one willing to turn the other cheek, The Retaliators swiftly prepares to put that trait to the test by having his daughter Sarah (Katie Kelly) cross paths with the local underworld, a fateful encounter that ends with Bishop desperate for vengeance.
Between the seemingly incongruous opening minutes and the final act, this is effectively a Christmas crime thriller, couched in flashbacks within flashbacks and shifting perspectives that don’t exactly coalesce as much as narratively sprawl in increasingly contrived fashion. There’s the subplot of warring rival gangs, embodied with growling murderous menace by Joseph Gatt’s crime boss Ram Kady. There’s Marc Menchaca as jaded Detective Jed, the man investigating Sarah’s murder and with dark secrets of his own. And there’s Bishop’s all-consuming grief and desire for righteous revenge; neither of these plots are intertwined with much grace, nor is the end goal of these various threads clear till resoundingly late in the runtime. Yet no matter how clunky and inelegant the storytelling gets, The Retaliators remains relentlessly entertaining, like flipping through a pulpy horror paperback where chapters switch between characters and the author seems to be headed…somewhere worthwhile despite the messy narrative.
When the directors reveal their full-blown horror hand, the film becomes a gory-soaked action-horror collision of all its seemingly disparate tones and plots, with a metal playlist to match the sudden zombie-esque siege splatterfest of a final act. A story of vengeance turns into bloody survival chaos, relishing in shotgun-blasting, head-rolling, viscera-spewing mayhem that lets Lombardi unleash his inner Ash Williams. The final confrontation is room-destroying, ultraviolent payoff after The Retaliators spent so much time playing its cards close to the vest.
Despite the muddled plotting, the po-faced first half, the underdeveloped characters who exist more as plot devices, The Retaliators can’t be called dull. This is a horror exercise that embraces the genre’s freedom to twist and swerve all in the name of playfully twisted entertainment. Even during the most cliched points of the middle act, the promise of that madcap gory opening looms and is fulfilled with gnarly aplomb by the end.
Photo courtesy of CineLife Entertainment
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