Disappointment for a huge fan!

An Exercise In Nonsense

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Scott Haze convincingly plays the title role as Lester Ballard, a mentally deficient adult who lives off the land in rural Tennessee. He is the type of man who yells at passing cars. The film is set in the 1950s (?) in late autumn. The only home Lester has known was recently auctioned off. Through a series of circumstances Lester discovers necrophilia, which has never been one of my favorite film topics, except for maybe as a dark comedy which this wasn't.I will say the acting was excellent. The story was done well, bravo James Franco, but unfortunately didn't go anywhere. This is an excellent crime/ drama/ thriller, I didn't enjoy.Parental Guide: F-bomb, sex, necrophilia, nudity (Nina Ljeti, Elena McGhee)

This movie is actually pretty good. The problem with it is that it does not stand alone as a movie. If you haven't read the book, you probably won't like the movie. If you have read the book, then you will enjoy this adaptation of a sympathetic depiction of a lonely serial killer.

When me and my boyfriend saw this at the Redbox we thought it had some decent actors and sounded like it could be interesting so why not? We should have stayed away from this one, first reason being I felt the description was misleading. If the description had read **SPOILER ALERT** ""A deranged back woods necrophiliac finds friends in stuffed animals while sleeping around with dead back seat lovers" then perhaps it would have been accurate. Even "The 'No Country for Old Men' of West Virginia but with necrophilia" would have sufficed. This movie was deeply disturbing, but I can look past that as there are many disturbing movies that I don't feel wasted several hours of my life that I'll never get back. What really bothered me about this movie was the lack of an apparent plot line, or perhaps the movie was so freaking boring I couldn't concentrate on watching this movie long enough to pick up on it. Or maybe the author was only interested in writing hillbilly porn for men with fantasies of sleeping with dead lifeless corpses. I haven't read the book and after seeing this I certainly won't be. As a last note, I usually enjoy James Franco's work but after seeing this I'm never taking his involvement as a sign that a movie is worth watching again.

Unengaging and dull.A man lives on the fringes of society in a remote rural area. Over time his anti-social behaviour becomes more and more extreme, deranged and felonious.Despite the grittiness of the plot and some potentially controversial scenes, the movie feels quite empty. It's just a 100- minute walk-though of a few days in the life of an insane, feral person. There is no engagement with the lead character. We don't get his backstory, or any reason to empathise with him. So it just feels like a join-the-dots, blow-by-blow exercise with no point at all.While the script is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, the movie is directed by James Franco, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Now you see where the problem lies... Turns out the only thing worse than James Franco's acting is his directing. On the plus side, while Franco does act in the movie, his role is quite small and has little screen time.