Movie Review: Population 436
Enter a mildly annoying male lead, a quiet small town, and a surprisingly good soundtrack.
*Spoilers for Population 436 (2006) ahead.
I am always on the lookout for an odd horror movie that I’ve never heard of before. Something that promises to be a suspenseful small town romp is usually right up my alley - Population 436 seemed, from the outset, to be just that.
Going off the cover and brief description in IMDb I was not surprised that this was a direct-to-video movie made back in 2006, by director Michelle MacLaren. She’s most well known for directing episodes of The X-Files, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead — and knowing that now, I can see it. The whole movie plays out like an especially long episode of The X-Files, wherein Mulder has lost all his odd quirks and personality and Skully is a 50s era housewife who ultimately does very little except sleep with the not-Mulder.
What’s it about? (spoilers ahead)
We start in Rookland Falls, a quiet town in North Dakota with exactly 436 residents. A woman is giving birth while, simultaneously, a man in a truck is racing to leave town. He hits a massive pothole (seriously the thing must be a foot deep) and dies when his truck explodes which just so happens to be the moment the baby is born. We cut to a very distraught daughter and some children playing in the disturbingly full cemetery.
Our main character, Steve Kady, is a rather bland man who works for the US Census Bureau who has noticed that towns don’t usually stay at exactly the same population for 100 years and has decided to investigate. He also hits the pothole but, unfortunately, doesn’t flip over and instead pops his tires. Side note… not sure potholes do that? I mean, they’ll mess up your axel sure enough but pop just your left tires? Seems suspicious. Also you could just drive on the grass Steve, it’ll grow back.
He ends up staying with a nice-ish older lady and her very pretty daughter Courtney, whom the youngest sheriff (my favorite character, Bobby) has already declared will be his wife one day. He just hasn’t picked up the courage to ask. Also Bobby is played by Fred Durst, the frontman for Limp Bizkit. So… take that however you will.
Shit happens and the town is creepy but for me the emotional heart of the movie is the fact that Steve clumsily steals Sheriff Bobby’s intended fiancée. The worst part is that Bobby is actively defending Steve to one of his sheriff friends AS IT HAPPENS ON SCREEN. And he catches them in the act, HOLDING THE RING HE WANTS TO PROPOSE WITH. Ugh. It’s just such a dick move on Steve’s part and I hate the whole thing. Also I’m pretty sure the only appeal of Steve is that he’s a new face and Courtney just desperately wants to leave town. Which, by the way, isn’t allowed. The townsfolk think you’ll get struck down by god if you try to leave — which leads into the really drastic steps they take to try to stop you “for your own good”.
The big reveal comes about halfway through and is very Midsommar; they hold a festival every time their population rises (despite Stevey-boy not intending on moving there — he’s literally been there for like two days) and they just straight up murder one of the townsfolk. She’s very excited about it which is… off-putting to say the least.
In the end Steve tries to leave because the whole public hanging thing turned him off to the quaint little town — geesh, I wonder why? The town doctor (who has never been to medical school and it shows) tries to give him electroshock therapy to keep him content with consistent murder (does it do that?) but it doesn’t stick and he flees, with the daughter of the man who had exploded in his truck all the way back in the beginning. There was a whole plotline there, along with some ‘fever’ which is really just people’s natural desire to leave, but emotionally it took a backseat to Steve stealing a man’s love right out from under him. I don’t blame Courtney at all — want to make that clear. Bobby had never proposed or even made his feelings clear… I don’t think they were even dating. So she had no real way of knowing. But Steve did!
Courtney was taken by the doctor for trying to help Steve and is lobotomized, turning her into the perfect 50s housewife and making it impossible for Steve to take her with him. It’s all very sad, but I was busy yelling at the screen for him to move it along because at this point all three of the town’s sheriffs are after him.
After one final standoff with poor broken-hearted Bobby, Steve and the random little girl make it out. They’re driving away and things are good but then there are weird parallels to a creepy dream they had both been having the whole movie and, because Steve was looking around the car instead of at the road, they hit a tractor trailer and they both die.
It’s real abrupt.
We cut back to town and one of Steve’s Census Bureau coworkers is rolling up to check in on him and the sheriff meets him as he also pops his tires (seriously… do pot holes do that? Is this how the town collects all of its victims?) and informs him and the audience that Bobby is engaged to his brain-dead love and some other lady had twins, balancing out the deaths that had occurred when Steve fled. The new guy is escorted into town and I presume the whole plot repeats itself because he doesn’t seem like the brain-washed type either.
Thoughts?
Usually I yell at the screen during a movie like this, and I did, but for entirely different reasons than I expected. I was expecting a bid baddie like aliens or an ancient god or… something? What I got was a mildly unsettling movie that was pretty good at building suspense but was ultimately too long for the plot. We spent A LOT of time in town just establishing that the creepy town is, in fact, creepy. And that’s before the town-approved murder!
Also I always laugh when Netflix tells me there is some “sensuality” in the movie I’m about to watch. Usually it means I’ll see some side-boob while two characters kiss or look longingly at each other from across the room, but we got some full angles in this one so that was unexpected. Although, I guess I was warned so I can’t blame Netflix. I think it could have done without the entire romance angle that it halfheartedly attempted; if the weird love triangle hadn’t been included, I would have rated it higher in the enjoyment category.
If you want Midsommar but more B-movie, less gore, set in North Dakota with only white people, and a main character with a tragic-but-not-too-tragic backstory — it’s the movie for you.
Technical Quality
Just the Vibes
Things I enjoyed this week:
A lot of people do these and I want to practice some gratitude, so here we go. Maintenance Phase, a phenomenal podcast that I’ve been listening to for a few months now. I found it because Michael Hobbes was a co-host for another podcast I love, You’re Wrong about (I highly recommend the McDonald’s Hot Coffee episode, and the entire OJ Simpson saga). A homemade London Fog which for me is earl gray tea, a spoonful of brown sugar, cream, and probably too much vanilla extract. Enchiladas verdes filled with pulled pork from a newly found favorite local Mexican restaurant. This month’s dive bar t-shirt from the Dive Bar Shirt Club happened to be from an Irish pub so it was extremely timely and I appreciate that.
Ciao ✌️
Lauren