SQUEALER - Mark Reviews Movies

Squealer, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

Not even close to as disturbing and gross as it clearly wants to be, Squealer leaves one wondering two main things. First, why are the filmmakers so intent on the attempt to portray so much unnecessary suffering, so many gruesome sights, and such a willful disregard for human life? Second, how are they so abjectly incompetent at even trying to do so?

The movie, written by director Andy Armstrong and star Danielle Burgio, is a fairly straightforward serial killer thriller, in which we observe the horrific deeds of a psychotic murderer and the attempt to find this man in order to bring him to justice. What could go wrong in terms of telling such a simple, tried-and-true story?

Well, everything could, as it turns out. The two main characters here are the killer, known as Squealer (Ronnie Gene Blevins, who at least has enough off-kilter charm to convince us that this character might be able to lure women to their deaths), and maybe a social worker named Lisa (Burgio), who starts to notice that the sex workers she's watching and trying to help are disappearing at an alarming rate. The character is an odd one, mainly in that she is more or less the protagonist of this story but that her presence here—from how unimportant she is to the course of the plot to how the screenplay never quite explains who she works for, what her job is, or what any of her goals in this mystery career actually are—comes across as an afterthoguht.

The cops here are useless. They include Lisa's ex (Whether that's husband or boyfriend is up to us to guess at, apparently) Jack (Wes Chatham), who spends most of his time hanging around the office, talking about how the investigation into those murders isn't going, and being aggressively flirted with by co-worker Sadie (Sydney Carvill), whose unbuttoned blouses and bra-less existence are certainly distractions—although for less-than-obvious reasons. Does this police department have a dress code, or is the movie's mind as entirely in the gutter as everything else around it suggests?

Squealer's side of the tale certainly points in that direction. With the help of partner Earline (Kate Moennig), he picks up various women—mostly sex workers and drug addicts around town but also a random hitchhiker at one point—and convinces them to come back to his pig farm. There, he gets them high on some potent concoction, lets them strip naked, lays down some plastic, and begins butchering them alive. Armstrong lingers on the nudity in ways that go beyond just seeing these women as being in a wholly vulnerable state, and as for the violence, it's mainly a relief that the movie is so overlit that we can tell how cheap both the digital and practical gore effects are.

The gimmick here is that Squealer turns his victims into sausage and sells the meat products at the local shop. It's apparently a favorite of another cop, who's played by Tyrese Gibson in what must have been some kind of favor to someone on the production for as little screen time he has.

Anyway, Lisa starts looking into the case after one of Squealer's potential victims escapes (naked, of course) and is hit by, not one, but two sizeable vehicles at two different moments of trying to get away from the killer. The whole thing becomes blandly repetitious, with Lisa arguing with Jack about doing something already about all the missing/murdered women and Squealer being creepy before killing yet another woman.

Some of the stranger oddities here include a gangster—again, maybe, because he's yet another character who enters with and gain no introduction—played by Theo Rossi, a moment in which Jack crawls into bed with an eviscerated corpse (and emerges without a spot of blood on him, because the costume budget must be preserved), and having the protagonist spend the majority of the climax in a broken-down car in the middle of the desert, while making and missing multiple phone calls to and from people who definitely don't have anything better to do at the time. Hey, it inflates the run time and makes sure that everybody is in more danger than they need to be for a final showdown.

Squealer looks cheap, but let's not hold that too much against it. The movie's cheapness goes much, much deeper than appearances, and so, too, do its incompetence and ugliness.

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