The Price We Pay review: Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff get a horrible surprise on a remote ranch

Fans of the genre will get their money's worth with "The Price We Pay", a violent crime and macabre-horror-action outing with no pretense to be anything else. What this tale of crooks locked in a lonely farm with a hideous secret lacks in originality, it makes up for with energetic direction from Ryuhei Kitamura ("Midnight Meat Train"), excellent practical gore effects, and solid performances by a quality cast including Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff and Gigi Zumbado. The kind of no-frills exploitation film that once had them screaming at the grindhouse, “Price” available on VOD will be released on limited screens by Lionsgate on January 13.

The bodies start piling up shortly after Grace (Zumbado from "Bridge and Tunnel") enters in a pawn shop on the outskirts of a dusty town. Unlucky and heavily in debt to the sleazy store owner, Grace barely has time to rebuff his advances before the joint is attacked by armed robbers Cody (Dorff), Alex (Hirsch), and Alex's brother Shane ( Tanner Zagarino). Following an impressively staged bloodbath, Grace is taken hostage and forced to act as a getaway driver.

With Shane badly injured and roadblocks everywhere, Grace drives down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere go. In the age-old tradition of these tales, his car breaks down near what appears to be an abandoned ranch. By now we've found out that Cody is an ex-Army medic with something resembling a conscience at least, Grace was raised as an Army brat, and Alex is a smiley psychopath who likes to kill and berate. his brother for complaining about his life-threatening gunshot wound.

Far from being abandoned, the ranch is home to nervous teenager Danny (Tyler Sanders) who proposes Cody and company take shelter for the night. The tone Danny adopts when he says "my grandpa is out right now" leaves no doubt that terrible things will happen once grandpa returns. Sure enough, Grandpa (played by Aussie actor Vernon Wells, who has enduring cult status for his role as the post-apocalyptic Wez fighting machine in "The Road Warrior") is a demented doctor who's built a sprawling surgery complex -laboratory-prison under the innocent -looking family home.

The only ho-hum parts of the movie are those in which Grandpa does his dreadful job while listening to the Nassun Dorma's famous aria from Puccini's "Turandot" and pontificating on his glorious mission to rid the world of evil men and give hope to the less fortunate. But those are just minor bumps in an otherwise fast-paced survival thriller punctuated by extremely bloody non-elective surgery and gruesome corpse-disposal activities carried out by Grandpa's masked sidekick, Jodi, played by the actor. 6-foot-8 model Erika Ervin, aka Amazon Eve ("American Horror Story").

Dorff is rock solid as a soft-hearted ex-military man. In her highest-profile feature film role to date, Zumbado is compelling and appealing as a troubled young woman whose quick thinking is key to her survival. Hirsch relishes the opportunity to play a sick psychopath, but is let down by scripts that give his character initially intriguing details such as a penchant for dice-rolling, but ultimately fail to make Alex as interesting or dangerous as he is. he could have been. p>

Kitamura's sleek direction, vivid and colorful imagery by DP Matthias Schubert and a crisp score from the collaborator Kitamura's frequent Aldo Shllaku ensures there's hardly a dull moment, even in such familiar surroundings. We've been down this route before and will return, but "The Price We Pay" has enough gas in the tank to make the detour worth it. On a very sad note, the film is dedicated to the memory of Tyler Sanders, who tragically passed away on June 12, 2022, at just 18 years old.