Entertainment

‘Jug Face’ lives up to stereotypes

In the backwoods setting of “Jug Face” lives a group of country folk who are absolutely not Appalachian stereotypes: They’re just like millions of others who seldom bathe, sleep with their siblings, and guarantee their continued health by making human sacrifices to a muddy pit rather than by filling out insurance forms.

Admittedly, Chad Crawford Kinkle has made a fleet, fluid film. The greenery of the location is as sinister as any dungeon, the plot is carefully laid out, and the performances — particularly, Lauren Ashley Carter as reluctant teenage sacrifice Ada, and Sean Young as Ada’s hyena of a mother — are as good as possible under the circumstances.

Yet this morbid, cruel movie seems leached of all things that might inadvertently give viewers pleasure. The story reworks Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which was itself “The Rite of Spring” with the added horror of an American small-town setting. But in “Jug Face,” subtlety is a no-show, and making the pit’s supplicants a bunch of inbred hillbillies adds a layer of cliché, not fright.

These people aren’t so much terrifying as they are disagreeable, and the figure who arouses the most compassion is a dead possum.