Genre Horror

Porkchop (2010)

Item: Porkchop
Rating: 0.5
Author: Ross McLaren

½ — Porkchop (2010)

Let me be straight with you: I watched this because of Sierra Ferrell. Yes, that Sierra Ferrell. The singer-songwriter who's gone on to become one of the most distinctive voices in Americana, a genuine talent with an old-soul quality that stops you cold. Before all of that, she apparently appeared in a low-budget horror film about cannibals who really like pork. She's in it for roughly the length of time it takes to make a cup of tea, and then she's gone, and you're left sitting there wondering what exactly you've done to deserve the next seventy-odd minutes of your life.

What follows her exit is one of the most aggressively bad horror films I've ever had the misfortune of sitting through. And I've sat through some rough ones.

The setup is about as unoriginal as it gets: a group of obnoxious friends head out to a remote cabin and get picked off by a backwoods cannibal family with a very specific dietary preference. That's it. That's the whole thing. Now, I'm not precious about simple premises. Simple premises can work brilliantly when there's atmosphere, tension, a shred of craft holding it together. Think about what The Witch (2015) does with isolation and dread, how it makes you feel the walls closing in without ever being cheap about it. Porkchop doesn't have a single frame that understands what made films like that effective. It's not even trying.

The dialogue is laughably awful. Not in a fun, quotable way. In the way where you genuinely start to wonder whether anyone did a second draft, or a first draft, or if the script was just a napkin someone scribbled on. The acting matches it beat for beat, wooden and flat even by the standards of micro-budget horror where you're already cutting people significant slack. Characters argue, wander down dark corridors, argue some more, wander down more corridors. The pacing is so sluggish it starts to feel personal.

And then there's the gore, which is cheap in the way that doesn't carry any trashy charm. The cinematography is murky throughout, not in a considered or stylish way but in the way that suggests the lighting budget was roughly nothing. The sound design is genuinely broken at points. Random screeches arrive out of nowhere. The music is off-key in all the wrong ways. Jump scares are deployed with no setup, no release, no understanding of how the mechanics of a good scare actually work. It wants to be somewhere in the territory of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre crossed with Wrong Turn, films that at least had a point of view, a nastiness with purpose behind it. Porkchop has none of that. It's mean-spirited without earning the meanness, gross without the courage of its grossness.

There's a version of this kind of film, ultra-low budget and knowingly scuzzy, that works precisely because it owns what it is. Horror has a rich tradition of genuinely brilliant work done for next to nothing. I loved When Evil Lurks for exactly that reason, a film that creates something viscerally unsettling on limited means because the people making it actually understood dread and consequence. Porkchop understands neither. It's artistically bankrupt, barely coherent from scene to scene, and morally unpleasant in a way that seems entirely accidental rather than intentional.

The only reason this gets half a star rather than none is because Sierra Ferrell is in it, and she deserves at least a token acknowledgement. Her presence here is a genuine curiosity, a strange footnote in the career of someone who went on to do genuinely beautiful work. If you're a fan, I understand the pull. I felt it too. My advice: watch five seconds of her early scene on YouTube and close the tab immediately. Do not do what I did. Do not watch the rest of it.

Half a star. And that half belongs entirely to her.

Rating: ½ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2025-10-16

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