Tommy Snöberg Söderberg 
American Gothic (1987) is a film that I’ve heard an enormous amount of good things about, but for some reason I’ve never actually seen it myself. I just never got around to it, and I don’t know why. The premise is certainly appealing—an odd family living in isolation in their own peculiar way, and the external threat posed by some strangers whose plane crash-lands just outside their island. These are really fantastic premises, and you should be able to do pretty much anything with them. I don’t mean that the film doesn’t go off in some wild directions, because bizarre and absurd it certainly is! It doesn’t have to spurt blood every other yard of film to be good… But somewhere along the way it becomes a little sluggish and uninteresting after all.
The acting isn’t exactly top-notch, even though a few members of the cast really impress me. Janet Wright, for example, gives a completely fabulous performance as the 50-year-old little girl Fanny. Her body language and pitch are absolutely perfect! The leads, Rod Steiger and Yvonne de Carlo as Ma and Pa, are also very good, and I have a bit of an extra fascination with Michael J. Pollard, as I always do.
I think it has something to do with the Star Trek episode Miri, where I first became acquainted with him, but that’s another story. The family itself works pretty well, then! The problem is that the strangers who arrive on the little island aren’t quite in the same league when it comes to acting. They don’t really have any particularly interesting characters to work with either, but at times they’re simply not believable.
Ultimately, it becomes a somewhat unusual slasher, because I definitely think you can count it as part of this subgenre. It contains so many of its ingredients that anything else would be unthinkable. Unfortunately, the film falls into the trap of turning the plot around a few too many times toward the end, to the point where it becomes a little too much, but I still find it to be a very watchable film!
About the Author
Del Gibson 
