Movie Review: Hanger (2009)

Wow. There's a huge problem with independent horror, especially lately. Maybe Hostel is to blame for some of it. I don't know. Indies get a pass in a few areas, like film quality and soundtrack, but they also often think it's a good idea to ignore story, acting, directing and entertaining. It's becoming a competition to see who can be the most disgusting. Hanger suffers from this affliction.

Buy Hanger on DVD

I get trying to be funny. I get pushing limits. That's fine, but there's a point when it just gets stupid. That point happened about five minutes into the movie. I'll give you the basics. A guy with a rubber nose knocks up a hooker. Her pimp, who is played by a guy who obviously watched a few pimp movies and horribly emulates them, shoves a hanger into her and aborts her almost full term baby. The fetus grows up to be a horribly disfigured freak named Hanger and is led by his father, whose face gets more rubbery as the movie goes on, to try to kill the pimp.

The acting is brutal, and it isn't made any better by the dialogue. I don't know what it is about independent movies, but there seems to be a set of rules to writing the shitty dialogue. First, you have to say nigger at least once, and it has to sound forced and out of place. I blame Tarantino for that. Next, you have to create absurd terminology for sexual acts. "I'd like to fry my onion in her canola pit." Finally, you have to say cunt and/or motherfucker as many times as humanly possible. Hanger gets an A+ in this category.

The gross out moments start with the rubber vagina that the pimp's abortion hanger enters. Let this be a lesson to all of you budding filmmakers out there. You don't always need to see everything. Sometimes that ruins what you are trying to do. There is a deformed guy who anally rapes two other deformed guys in their sleep. I don't know about you, but I'd wake up from a giant dick in my ass. This is another thing we see. When the guy rapes Hanger, we see the dick go into an asshole filled with shit.

The characters are ridiculous. We have three deformed guys who work at the dump, which seems to be run by a hot girl with fake boobs who masturbates naked on her desk in front of an open window for no reason. She also doesn't wake up while she's raped and has a tampon removed from her. I can't even get into the rest. It's just too stupid to justify.

Bad horror has one job: to be fun. We don't go into these movies expecting much. We want to have a good time. We want to laugh at the bad acting and the horrible effects. I don't want to be bored by a lack of creativity. You can be edgy and use gore in creative ways. One movie that comes to mind is Sick Girl. It was bad, but it was entertaining. The twisted gore made sense. This was just pointless.

If you like gore for the sake of gore, have fun. Personally, I want it to mean something. I want it to ramp up. Starting at full speed and then tapering off into aimless rambling is no way to go. Skip Hanger. I really wish I did.