"Plank Face" is a strange horror movie that largely eschews scares and gore in favour of sex and nudity. It takes a run at doing something that I think is fairly unique, or would be, if it had been pulled off a little better.
For a "unique" film, it opens with stunningly familiar material, in which we see the bad guys kill some people. Slashers so often begin with this - think "Scream" and "Halloween". If that's not familiar enough, it even ticks off the most famous of the horror movie "rules": having sex gets you killed.
The movie then lurches into more unfamiliar territory, with a credit sequence that, unlike its opening scene, does not seem to belong to a typical slasher. We are introduced to the protagonist, a hipster-slash-outdoorsman, and his girlfriend, who are hiking through the woods. There, they run into another hipster-type, who chokes out the protagonist (in a fairly unrealistic scene). The protagonist comes to, and finds the other hipster raping his girlfriend. He promptly murders her.
None of this is as shocking as you'd expect; it just doesn't connect. It's handled unbelievably, and I think a large part is the pacing: this all happens before you know what's what.
Next, the young man is imprisoned by some yahoos who live out in the woods. First, they torture him by hammering a nail into his foot - which also seems pretty unrealistic as there's not enough blood or pain from the actor - and then they force him to eat offal.
Soon - much too soon, I might add - our hipster/outdoorsman is a happy member of the tribe, if that's what it is.
Throughout the ordeal he never loses his cover-boy sheen, as though the hut these people live in is actually on the beaches of Malibu. You would expect some kind of physical transformation to go with his caveman-like regression. You don't get it, unless you count the titular Plankface, and constant nakedness.
Why does the protagonist fall in line with these cannibal freaks so quickly? Was the part at the beginning with the rapist-hipster supposed to show that he had something caveman-like in his nature?
The plot of the film is different; the handling, unfortunately, is not different enough.
