The title (and the cover of the DVD box) refers to the famous painting by Grant Wood, Gothic meaning the style of the picture, less the content. Being a great fan of Rod Steiger, I could not resist buying the DVD. It is a mixed bag. I just suspect that with a few touches here and there this could have been quite a good movie.
The start is promising. A young man gets his wife out of a mental institution where she was kept after her baby drowned accidentally. The psychiatrist is really smug, he obviously enjoys telling the husband that with his wife anything could happen. The husband decides to visit with her a place where they spent their honeymoon. Together with a few friends they board a seaplane - an old and dirty and rickety seaplane. I repeat: a seaplane that is OLD and DIRTY. They take off and guess what happens next. I give you a hint: splutter, splutter.
That is the typical start of a Good Bad Movie in anyone's language. The subject is well known in the American horror genre: young, innocent people meet old, frustrated yet colorful country folk. Scenes of gore ensue. Added to this is the classical island theme of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians the young and innocent get killed one by one. The last surviving member of the involontary expedition" fuses with the murderous opponents. Follows a gory finale. The end.
Several points are worth mentioning that make American Gothic partly watchable. The movie is very beautiful. The plane flying over a group of islands in the opening sequence is visually great, and the dark, mossy virgin forest of the island where the group gets stranded reminded me of John Sayle's Limbo (whose story has some similarity with American Gothic here and there). The set design is also excellent. An interesting aspect in the story is the fact that all the inhabitants of the island turn up out of nowhere. First, Ma and Pa surprise the youngsters in their house which they had entered in a clear case of trespassing, opening cupboards, taking out clothes etc. Later, suddenly a daughter turns up, then a son, then another. This strange and unexpected multiplication of characters has a stimulating effect on the viewer (are they ghosts, only existing in the imagination, are they some kind of mutants?) but is left unexplained.
The acting is not bad at least on the part of the strange family. Rod Steiger is quite good as the head of the family, Yvonne de Carlo is OK as the matriarch. Janet Wright and Michael J. Pollard are great as the demented kids. But unfortunately the story leads to nowhere. As I said, I think with little changes much more could have been made with this confrontation of new and old, today's and yesterday's values.
The start is promising. A young man gets his wife out of a mental institution where she was kept after her baby drowned accidentally. The psychiatrist is really smug, he obviously enjoys telling the husband that with his wife anything could happen. The husband decides to visit with her a place where they spent their honeymoon. Together with a few friends they board a seaplane - an old and dirty and rickety seaplane. I repeat: a seaplane that is OLD and DIRTY. They take off and guess what happens next. I give you a hint: splutter, splutter.
That is the typical start of a Good Bad Movie in anyone's language. The subject is well known in the American horror genre: young, innocent people meet old, frustrated yet colorful country folk. Scenes of gore ensue. Added to this is the classical island theme of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians the young and innocent get killed one by one. The last surviving member of the involontary expedition" fuses with the murderous opponents. Follows a gory finale. The end.
Several points are worth mentioning that make American Gothic partly watchable. The movie is very beautiful. The plane flying over a group of islands in the opening sequence is visually great, and the dark, mossy virgin forest of the island where the group gets stranded reminded me of John Sayle's Limbo (whose story has some similarity with American Gothic here and there). The set design is also excellent. An interesting aspect in the story is the fact that all the inhabitants of the island turn up out of nowhere. First, Ma and Pa surprise the youngsters in their house which they had entered in a clear case of trespassing, opening cupboards, taking out clothes etc. Later, suddenly a daughter turns up, then a son, then another. This strange and unexpected multiplication of characters has a stimulating effect on the viewer (are they ghosts, only existing in the imagination, are they some kind of mutants?) but is left unexplained.
The acting is not bad at least on the part of the strange family. Rod Steiger is quite good as the head of the family, Yvonne de Carlo is OK as the matriarch. Janet Wright and Michael J. Pollard are great as the demented kids. But unfortunately the story leads to nowhere. As I said, I think with little changes much more could have been made with this confrontation of new and old, today's and yesterday's values.