Beautiful People [Review]

Allow me to start by saying that Beautiful People is legitimately shocking. It couples two sub-genres that couldn’t possibly have less to do with one another. One of which I love; the other, I despise. I am referring of course to Home Invasion (yay!) and Zombies (goddamnit). Still though, this unique marriage of macabre realism and the undead piqued my interest, so I had to check it out.

We follow a trio of madmen that force their way into the homes of others for the sole purpose wreaking havoc and disrupting the lives of those they find “undeserving” of their particular life arrangement. We get a little insight as to the motive of these individuals every once in a while, but it’s never really fleshed out in any sort of meaningful way. Sometimes crazy is better left as crazy. We don’t always need to know the logic – so this wasn’t a problem for me. What I did find slightly annoying; were the long drawn out sections of dialogue that try so hard to make us feel uncomfortable. These talks often focus on the taboo. So yeah, I get it. It’s fucked up, but i felt as if we were stuck for a few minutes. Otherwise, Beautiful People is paced relatively well for a film that clocks in south of 80 minutes.

Unfortunately for this trio, they enter a house that has something much more sinister inside than they could have possibly imagined. This plot is strong enough to get us from point A to point B, but not much more than that. After all, these genres don’t exactly go hand in hand – so things are bound to feel slightly uneven.

But the story is only half the battle right? So how does Beautiful People look? Pretty damn good, actually. This is Brini Amerigo’s directorial debut, and it’s an incredibly impressive one. Angles are great, the film quality itself is fantastic, and the effects are top notch. My only gripe is that there weren’t more of them. When our zombie-esque friends are ripping flesh from limbs, or transforming into uber zombies of some sort; it looks incredible. Hopefully we get more of that in future projects from Amerigo. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of brutality – but we need moooooorrre.

In case you’re unclear; I’m impressed with what the film has to offer. Or at least I was up to a point. There comes a time when all hell breaks loose and the film finds itself so far off the rails that it can’t recover. It feels slightly rushed, and all of the success that was built previously seems to fizzle out. Well, perhaps “fizzle out”  is the wrong way to put it, because Beautiful People ends with a fucking bang – in more ways than one.

Beautiful People is distributed by Ravenbanner Entertainment and Monster Pictures. That means there is no formal US release for those of us that reside in America. Luckily, Monster Pictures offers a rental straight from their website. It’s absolutely worth a watch. – and get this – if you sign up for Monsterbox.tv , you get a free rental that can be used towards (you guessed it) Beautiful People. So what are you waiting for? Beautiful People is brutal, perverse, graphic, and shocking. Even if the story trails off a bit, it doesn’t cancel out all of the things that the film does so well.