Jug Face (2013)

A reclusive backwoods society maintains their way of life by making sacrifices to an unspecified monster. When a teenage girl discovers both that she is pregnant and she's the next sacrifice, she tries to escape her fate.

Some blood, but mostly just creepy and sees the ending through with more focus than A-List movies.

Acting is not just serviceable but good, especially since it deals with backwoods archetypes that it's hard to not turn into a parody. This thing is deadly serious and realistically portrayed even with the supernatural elements.

Good movie - kind of a different take on "Winter's Bone" if you liked that. Check it out.

Fmovies: Just finished watching this and I have to say, it's everything I want in a short, well packaged southern Gothic story. I don't want to give anything away but i will cover a few basics. The acting is well above the norm for this type of film with all of the leads playing their roles very believably. The story of a a small, backwoods community that worships a pit that demands a sacrifice to ensure the health of the others is a simple premise that surrounds itself with enough drama to give the actors plenty to work off. The soundtrack is nice and haunting with a southern twist on the guitar riffs that add to the sense of oddity. The director makes good use of the limited number of actors to create a sense of how isolated these people are from the rest of the world without it seeming forced. The story is extremely dark and with plenty of blood, though not much gore, and plenty of disturbing dialogue that makes you really understand the sense of desperation and insanity that hangs over the characters. The movie moves at a slow pace but without losing your attention. To the contrary, the pacing makes the inevitable conclusion all the more painful and accentuates the "deep woods" atmosphere that is injected along the full length of this tale of blood, family, tradition and the the consequences that result. Please do yourself a favor and give this beautifully shot film a viewing, you won't be disappointed.

JUG FACE is a highly recommended little gem of a horror film, with not a wasted frame, nor any lack of tension throughout, a perfect and extremely involving performance by captivating young lead Lauren Ashley Carter, an effective symbolic undercurrent, and enough of an emotional punch to literally bring tears to your eyes.

The film is exactly what a small-scale horror movie should be -- disturbing without being exploitative, scary without anyone trying to throw hatchets in your face in 3D, and operating in its own consistent yet just-not-right world where things just do not work the same way as they do in the outside world or mean the same things.

The subtext here, whether intentional or not, has to do with the terrors and wrongs of following an "old religion" long past its time and resonates boldly. Similarities to THE LOTTERY exist but there's much more to the story. The analogy works as well here as the fear-of-commie-invaders subtext did in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS in the 1950s. They say horror movies are most effective if they successfully tune in to the audience's fears at the time of its release. This one does an excellent job of that and seems like something that will never get old.

The only negatives here are that the community involved in the tale seems to be awfully small in number (no doubt due to budget constraints), the ineffective attempt at whatever sort of accent Sean Young, who is slightly miscast here, is attempting, and it is possible that by reordering one or two of the scenes and moving it back a bit the impact of the scene in which Ada discovers her "jug face" might have been strengthened, and possibly her attempt to escape her probable fate seems to be somewhat abortive, but if you consider what is supposed to be going on, and the ending they're going for, you understand why this is the case. These are rather minor problems though and do not detract from the film's power.

The actor who plays the potter who makes the jugs is also excellent and his performance moving.

This movie will leave you wanting more, and the terror of it is knowing, after it's over, well, you can't have it.

Excellent film all around, far better than overblown junk like CABIN IN THE WOODS, with an air to it of the simple but sometimes unforgettably scary radio dramas of the 1940s that audiences just couldn't forget and would listen to over and over. (Arch Oboler would love this movie.) I would not hesitate to suggest this is a real classic in the best sense of the word and I hope it gets noticed and does well. It'll certainly be remembered by those who see it, me included. Great job, filmmakers. 9/10

Jug Face fmovies. Ada is a sexually active girl in a religious community that lives in the forest making human sacrifice to their god, The Pit. The Pit possesses a chosen member of the community, making a jug with a face molded into it. The person who's face is on the jug is the person they must sacrifice. The Pit wants what it wants. When Ada finds her face on the new jug, she hides it as she suspects she may be pregnant.

This is a great, original new dramatic horror story with some excellent performances. Lauren Ashley Carter gives us reason to like a girl, who if given a different perspective of, most of us would judge harshly and look down upon as she's pregnant with her brother's child. Both her father and mother, played by Larry Fessenden and Sean Young, are played perfectly. However it's Sean Bridgers as Dawai, the jug-maker, who steals the show with his character.

Jug Face is written and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle. As good of a writer he may show promise to be, what holds Jug Face back from being a great film is that it is poorly paced. Enough time isn't spent on building suspense, adding tension, exploring the horror of all that is going on. We wish the film was longer so we could have spent more time getting to know the characters so that we care whether or not they are going to die. Whether this is a lack of talent or experience as a director is uncertain, what is certain is that the performances and the story make up for this. It's through Sean Bridgers and Lauren Ashley Carter that we come to care for their characters. Sean Young plays one of the most frightening mothers put to screen since Carrie and is more dreadful than The Pit.

Overall, Jug Face will be a twisted, original treat for fans of indie horror.

While it clearly suffers from a low budget, this movie works harder and is more interesting than most of the product that comes out of Hollywood these days.

You will enjoy the twist and turns in the plot. The writers obviously put more effort into the storyline than their big-budget counterparts in the film industry.

The lead actress is impressive as a victim of circumstance who yearns to break free of her world.

It's an intimate look into a slimy dirty mini-society... decent acting, believable dialog and passable set design. Give these folks some real funding and I bet they hit a home run.

A weird thing here. At first dark, textured about hillbilly life, promising some novelty. The handpainted credits bespeak of more personal work, that this comes to us from people who wanted to be creative and not some Hollywood office.

A girl in a repressive backwoods village becomes pregnant just as her parents have arranged marriage and then a mysterious force in the woods (centered in a pit that the people venerate) that seemingly can divine these things, demands blood sacrifice in return for healing and grants visions.

All the tension and strangeness in us being called to parse these wrathful metaphysics through the eyes of people that genuinely believe in them and allow them to dictate life while independent of them having to juggle the possibility that it's all a backwards hallucination, possibly invented: that the imbecile potter merely sculpts faces from a stupor or thin air but does that make the hold of evil less real?

It's clear that they only had a small sketch of the idea as they set to work, interesting at first but goes nowhere, never deeper than something in the earth has to be appeased and the madness of being unable to fathom order; it's still more textured than all the Texas Chainsaw clones, more unusual, but it just smears around with the mythology it creates. A complete loss by the end. Sad.