Body horror films aren’t anything new in Hollywood. Films like The Fly (1986), and Tusk and The Thing (1982) come to mind among others. This is a subgenre among the bigger genre of horror but also a popular subgenre. Fans of this genre lauded some of these films as some of the best in the entire genre. Appendage is the latest in this genre and it will surely have people talking about how crazy and weird it is.

Hannah (Hadley Robinson) is a young woman who lives with her boyfriend, Kaelin (Branden Mychal Smith), and works for a fashion designer. Her life is a bit stressful. Her boss is overbearing and very demanding of his people. Add in the fact that her parents aren’t easy to please either. She has one friend she trusts and gets along with like a sister,  Ester (Kausar Mohammed) but a lot of her love causes her to be very stressed. All this stress and anxiety causes her to develop an appendage that comes out of her birthmark. 

If you didn’t have all the body horror stuff this might be a generic rom-com, but it’s one of the craziest rom-coms with a twist I’ve ever seen. Because of this development in her life, Hannah ends up going to a therapy group for those who had a similar anomaly happen to them. The therapy group she attends is a comforting thing for her. In the process of attending a meeting at a secluded location she meets a new friend, Claudia (Emily Hampshire) who will become a constant presence in her life. Along with her appendage.

I’ve seen a lot of crazy and weird movies in my day but this one is up there as one of the weirdest and craziest I’ve ever seen. There is a twist in this story that makes it something totally different than how it started. The whole appendage is definitely weird and crazy but where this thing goes at about the one-hour mark is beyond belief in a horror movie or otherwise. The writer/director Anna Zlokovic threw me for a loop in this movie with that left turn.

Hadley Robinson is a newer actress I’ve come to know from her great turn as Jeanie Buss in Winning Time the HBO series about the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the early 80s. She goes to a different level entirely in this movie though. The director asks a lot of her and she delivers on all levels. The body horror aside, she has to interact with various people and accomplish different objectives with each character and she kills it in this role from the beginning of the movie till the end.

With a film about body horror, there has to be a lot of makeup and prosthetics and this film has amazing makeup and prosthetics. Along with the makeup and great prosthetics, the movie has some amazing puppetry as well. The appendage in question is part puppet and part animatronic creature. It does look a little bit wonky at times but I think that was the point. The filmmakers didn’t want it to be too realistic. It worked in that regard.

This Halloween season has brought a lot of different kinds of Horror films, but Appendage might be the wildest and craziest of them all.  The director wanted to give people something out of the ordinary so that they could say “What the heck did I just watch?” and she did that. This is one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of wild things on the big and small screen. Hadley Robinson is an actress I have been following for a couple of years now and she brought everything she had to the table as far as this character goes. As far as the film goes it’s not the best as a whole but I liked how the writer/director tried to do something different than anything I’ve seen before. That deserves some credit from perspective.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen