31 Days of Halloween: Appendage

2023, Anna Zlokovic (feature debut) -- Disney

When watching a very very indie flick with clunky characters and unbelievably low budget looking special effects, you have to wonder if its going to pay off. I guess I can say this one did, mostly, after it picked up some velocity in act three.

Hannah (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) and Esther (Kausar Mohammed, The Flash TV) live in NYC at a small fashion house for a mean diva boss. Hannah has an OK relationship with Kaelin (Brandon Mychal Smith, Four Weddings and a Funeral TV) after being setup together by Esther. And Hannah has a mean mom. The cardboard assembly of the characters and situations and strained over-acting by the characters as the movie began almost had me turn it off. Sometimes low-budget / indie shit just irritates me for that reason. Flesh out your character connections, think them through. If Hannah and Esther are best friends, and Esther was so connected to Kaelin that Hannah could possibly think the two have a thing, she should have known Kaelin before Esther set them up.

But it was too late to start something new, and this movie had some pretty good reviews, so I powered on. Powered on past the first sign that they really really needs a different practical effects team. The mean boss and mean mom and new relationship shit Hannah is going through literally manifests itself as a lump of flesh growing out of her birthmark, which then quickly separates itself from her, looking and talking like the effects person had seen 80s movie Ghoulies (one of the many Gremlins ripoffs) one too many times. Hannah locks it in the wardrobe but it continues to grow, taunting her from the confines. Hannah's internal asshole monologue has manifested. 

Is this movie a thinly veiled allegory? That suspicion is increased when Hannah does some shoddy "do your research" level Googling on DNA and comes up with chimera references, instantly finding the exact support group for people who also had lumps of flesh crawl off their body. Some exposition later and Hannah has the child-sized creature tied up in her basement, the basement she has key access to but nobody else ever goes, and makes friends with Claudia (Emily Hampshire, Schitt's Creek) from the support group.

Allegories and metaphors are tossed aside for a full-on creature feature with its own internal, weird logic that ... well, worked. It is helped by the committed involvement of Emily Hampshire, who brings a skilled portrayal to all the indie. While I was satisfied with the movie in the end, I would still end up saying it mostly falls into the category that Horror Fans (not just my usual use of Capitals) are usually jazzed about something new in their familiar buckets. And I am still not sure why, if I am doing this October thing again, I am not ascribing myself as a Horror Fan. I definitely am, but I will never be categorizing myself with the Fangoria reading, horror-con attending subculture that probably loved this movie more than I did.