Recent Reviews
Film Review: The Lost
By The Rev
Apr 7, 2006, 01:50

You know, I thought I’d seen a lot of pretty messed up stuff.  I mean, after a long time being a horror fan you become jaded, at least you think you do, to pretty much everything.  Well, color me all sorts of surprised and I’m more than willing to say I was wrong, as I just got back from a screening of The Lost, and for lack of a better word I must say I feel the slightest bit… dirty.  I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing, or that it’s a good thing for that matter, but since I usually find myself with a strong opinion on pretty much everything I watch, the fact that I’m not sure how I feel about this movie is a testament to its strength as one of the most flat-out visceral films in quite a while.

Ray Pye (Marc Senter) is a teen with little understanding of right or wrong and no direction in life.  He’s plenty happy sitting in the woods with his friend Tim (Alex Frost) and girlfriend Jennifer (Shay Astar), drinking, smoking and in general not doing much of anything constructive.  One day they spy a couple of naked girls out camping, at which point Ray hatches a plan.  Thinking the girls to be lesbians, he figures that they have little to no worth in the world, and that nobody would miss them if they were to die.  Sure enough, he pulls out a rifle and fires upon the girls, killing one and mortally wounding another with bullets to the head and chest.  He forces his crying friends to pull together and go back to his house so they could get some shovels to help them cover up the crime.  Waiting back at the campsite, Ray calmly eats some chips, cooks up a hotdog, and waits for his friends return… at least until he sees that the wounded girl has disappeared.  Indeed, the girl has run off, and chase her though he might Ray loses her when she makes it to the road and is rescued by some passing motorists.

Four years later, the wounded girl finally dies of her injuries at the hospital.  Detective Charlie Schilling (Michael Bowen) has been on the case since the girl was found, and has never given up in his belief that Ray Pye is guilty.  Unfortunately, evidence and eyewitnesses were hard to come by, and they’ve never been able to catch the youth.  Determined to catch Ray in the act, he begins to prod Ray, showing up at inopportune times and hounding the boy at all hours of the day.  Frustrated with the officers attacks, Ray is eventually pushed to the breaking point, forcing him out into the world in an orgy of blood, drugs and sex that leaves little room for survivors…

Character-wise, The Lost is a brilliantly played movie.  Marc Senter’s general mannerisms and tangible psychosis are very reminiscent of a younger Patrick Bateman, minus the self control at least.  In his more charming moments, he’s a nice enough guy and can even be pretty funny.  On the other hand, when his rage takes over he is a one man hurricane, scarier than most slashers are when they are on the rampage.  His general glee in shooting a young girl while forcing another to strip is disturbing to the nth degree.  Michael Bowen’s police officer is also very well played, as he plays the character as very world-weary, almost no longer believing in what he is doing, while at the same time determined to stop this madness at all costs.  Shay Astar’s take as the used and abused girlfriend of Ray Pye is inspired, if a slight bit tragic.  She knows what Ray is capable of and she knows what he will do to her if she were to ever cross him, but at the same time she loves him and doesn’t want to cross him because of it.  Among the entire cast, there are truly no weak links.

Stylistically though, I have to say that The Lost is a bit of a mess.  I’m sure they were trying to hearken back to the 70’s style of guerilla-shot exploitation films, but that didn’t stop it from being an occasionally painful experience simply to watch.  Film stocks were changed at random, music jumped in and out, half the time people are talking it’s impossible to hear what they’re saying because they don’t have a good microphone focusing on them, and if they tried any more quick edits I was liable to scream.  I know, I know, it’s a matter of taste, and they were successfully using these techniques to disorient and drop the audience into the insanity of the situation, but for this viewer it was a bit of a pain to say the least.  Perhaps a plus in the stylistic sense is this films restraint when it comes to the more violent scenes.  A lot of the more graphic details are kept offscreen and left more to our vivid imaginations (and eerie as hell sound effects), thereby keeping this film out of the levels of trashy and simply into bad taste.  Given the films last few minutes, you’ll be thankful for this restraint.

In the end, The Lost is more a test of your patience than anything else.  Clocking in at just around two hours, not a whole lot happens until the films last ten minutes or so after the opening murders.  For the impatient horror fans, this might be a bit of a problem, but to argue in the films favor (even though my ass got tired from sitting as long as it did) the down time is used to build up Ray’s insanity very well, and if it were not for the character building moments then the closing moments would have lost much of their impact.  It’s an incredibly visceral, violent and disorienting film.  This isn’t like the studio scare flicks that we see coming out every week, this is more along the lines of the pseudo-snuff film horror that came about during the mid-70’s.  If that’s your style, then this is a movie you’ll like.  Jury’s still out for me though.