Adam Egypt Mortimer's Some Kind of Hate

Cody is confronted by a supernatural slasher that will be in theatres and on VOD September 18th.

Following a violent altercation with a high school bully, troubled teenager Lincoln Taggert is sent to the remote Mind's Eye Academy reform school. There he ends up in the same exact sort of situation he was dealing with before, getting bullied by others who have been sent to the reform school.

As the intensity of the bullying increases, supernatural things start occurring on the Mind's Eye grounds, and teenagers start turning up dead.

The homicidal paranormal entity at play here is Moira Karp, the bloody spectre of a girl who was driven to suicide by bullying and is now back to make the bullies pay for their behavior. With their lives.

Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Adam Egypt Mortimer from a screenplay he wrote with Brian DeLeeuw, Some Kind of Hate is a movie that is firmly rooted in social issues of the day and yet feels oddly out of time. Something about the tone and style, music cues, the character of Lincoln himself all add up to make this feel to me like something that would have hit the video market twelve to fifteen years ago. If not for the presence of tech like smartphones, I could have believed this was a lost '00s slasher that had just been unearthed.

Aside from the fact that it made me feel like I had entered a time warp, I found the film to be an interesting viewing experience. It was off-putting to me at first, but drew me in more and more as things at Mind's Eye began to crumble.

It's a very dark film, with an unrelenting atmosphere and no room for levity. Moira's methods of murder may draw chuckles from some, but the deaths were so bloody and brutal that they didn't come off as humorous to me.

The cast Mortimer assembled includes Ronen Rubinstein as Lincoln, Sierra McCormick as Moira, and Grace Phipps as Lincoln's bad girl cheerleader love interest, with Spencer Breslin, Lexi Atkins, Maestro Harrell, and Noah Segan as some of the others who populate Mind's Eye. All of them deliver strong, noteworthy performances, but it's Rubinstein, McCormick, and Phipps who really get opportunities to shine.

Some Kind of Hate isn't the easiest movie to sit through, but I think horror fans will find it rewarding if they give it a try, and I recommend they do. It's a solid debut for Mortimer and a great new entry in the supernatural slasher sub-genre.

And if you don't like it, at least it lives fast and dies young just like its characters, moving along with a quick pace to a finish around the 80 minute mark.