MovieChat Forums > Hate Crime Discussion > My Hate Crime review

My Hate Crime review

posted 11 years ago by iamkrause
3 replies | jump to latest

(contains minor spoilers)

Hate Crime is a wonderfully nasty little gem of exploitation goodness, and a breath of fresh air for horror fans who have grown weary of all the PG-13, CGI ghost/devil spooky kid movies of the past decade. Pitch shifters, boo faces, and jump scares might startle in the moment, but Hate Crime's very real world horrors will linger long after the credits roll. The brutality starts about 2 minutes in and doesn't really stop until the credits roll.

Hate Crime is a "found footage" movie, and while some may argue that this premise has run it's course, it's the perfect format for a project like this. A nice Jewish family has just moved into a new neighborhood, and is recording their youngest son's birthday party when a not so nice trio of neo-Nazis invades the home to try and scare them into moving back out. An unplanned act of violence quickly escalates the situation into something that can't be undone, and all hell really starts to break loose.

What proceeds is 70 minutes of beatings, burnings, mutilations, rape, and murders... all in your face and up close thanks to the first person vantage point that the "found footage" format provides. It gives the horrors an intimacy that wouldn't be possible from a traditional narrative, and makes the viewer almost complaisant in the affairs. The victims are so completely dehumanized that by the end one becomes almost numb to their plight, until the credits roll and you're painfully reminded the extent of what's been lost. Powerful stuff.

But it's not just exploitation (and it would be fine if that's all it was), there's also a message here. Hate Crime exposes the damage that hate has on not only the victims, but the victimizers as well. It shows the futility of an ideological stance based on emotion rather than reason, and how the poisons of bigotry and xenophobia are far more harmful than the perceived threat of the targets. Nobody "wins" in this movie. There are no happy endings. Hatred destroys everything and everyone. But it's message isn't preachy, and never gets in the way of the action.

The only reason I don't rate this movie a 10 is because of the lack of total nudity. I just don't think that people who rape and kill you would let you leave your bra on. This is a minor quibble and doesn't detract from the film effectiveness, but it needs to be pointed out. At the end of the day, Hate Crime is exactly what I'm looking for in a horror movie, and rightly earns it's place among the greats of extreme cinema.

@iamkrause

[–] cynmoss 11 years ago

Glad you like it, I suppose, but it's pretty PG-13 to me. You don't see ANY nudity and they don't even do a good job trying to make you believe that sex occured. (I see that you noted no nudity, but the mom even always has her panties on. Come on.)

This COULD have been a good movie, with a better budget and in the hands of a French extreme horror filmmaker, but here with no budget and in the bad hands, it's awful. God awful. Very lame.

At least A Serbian Film is a legitimate movie. *beep* up, but still a movie. So are plenty of other home invasion torture movies. I don't know what to call this, but it's not a movie. I wanted to like it, but it's so bad you can't.

[–] morecheryl 10 years ago

Many people have reviewed this film all at the request of the director. Lame bloggers that write up their poor review praising the film since they're friends with the filmmaker. It really makes it hard to trust amateur reviewers on the internet. If you can't honestly review a film you shouldn't be doing it. This is obviously a very poorly done film yet many people on the internet come together to promote it. Kind of makes you want to stick with Hollywood films and skip bad Independent stuff like this.

[–] timfranks1 10 years ago

I was just about to post something similar but well said morecheryl. This gives hard working independent filmmakers a bad name. It's so lazy! Get a few friends and acquaintances together and make a loud annoying film in a house and try to shock weak people with no lessons learned and nothing gained. Sadly it seems anything can get produced for cheap these days. I miss "film" because I truly believe "digital" is the downfall of movies. Thankfully there are those little gems that surface from time to time, this however isn't one of them.