The Bad Batch is a bit of an odd bird. Part Mad Max, part Texas Chainsaw Massacre, part cannibalism horror, part romance, it doesn’t quite fit into just one genre. The trailers for this movie have been appropriately odd, the latest adding a tinge of melancholy to the dystopian malaise. There’s definitely a story here, but the hypnotic weirdness of the trailer predicts an even weirder experience to come when you see the movie.
You might know director Ana Lily Amirpour from her fantastic debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. A feminist vampire movie that turned the genre on its head, it felt refreshingly sinister, and put Amirpour’s name on the map. Her second movie, The Bad Batch, premiered at TIFF last year and will finally get a release this summer.
You may recall an atmospheric black-and-white Iranian vampire film from a couple of years back called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; the debut feature from Ana Lily Amirpour was one of the best films of 2014, and introduced us to a promising new director. Amirpour is back this year with The Bad Batch, a dystopian cannibal western that’s playing this month at TIFF and stars Jason Momoa, Suki Waterhouse, Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey (this cast is nuts, y’all). To give us a little, um, taste of what’s in store, two new clips from the film have debuted online, and they might be a little different from what you expected.