Some Kind Of Hate (Movie Review)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

PLOT: When bullied teenager Lincoln Taggert is whisked away to a countryside reform camp, he inadvertently summons the ghost of a fellow bullied teenage girl who seeks gory vengeance on his behalf.

REVIEW: With very little accredited preamble to speak of, writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer delves headlong into the feature filmmaking world with SOME KIND OF HATE – an 82-minute indie bully-revenge flick with a high volume of gore that can’t quite compensate for its vapid storyline, drab production design, spotty acting and dopily threadbare screenplay. In what starts as a sort of interesting take on the in-vogue topic of high-school bullying, a worthy subject matter indeed, SOME KIND OF HATE ultimately recedes into rote and unconvincing tale of pernicious apparitions roaming gorily afoul at a summer reform camp. Very little we’ve not seen is offered here, and with only a semi-likable character or two to speak of, the overall result feels flat and forgettable. As for the title, the SOME KIND OF HATE it refers to, for this writer anyway, is that of agitated abhorrence!

Lincoln Taggert is a Fabio-haired, preening-emo-teenager who rocks out to death metal when driven to madness. Which is all the time, considering he’s the target of bullying both at home, via his slovenly father, and at school, by way of some preppy asshole who Lincoln actually appears to outweigh. This to me raises credibly issues right from the jump. This Lincoln fella, played by actor Ronen Rubinstein, obviously hits the gym with regularity, and has bigger biceps on display then any single one of this tormentors. Yet we’re supposed to believe he constantly takes shit from his peers – snide remarks, harmful threats, physical affronts, the like. I wasn’t buying it, not in the slightest. Oh well, one day at school Lincoln finally snaps on the aforementioned preppy and lacerates the dude’s cheek with a pocket blade. As a result, he’s ordered to attend Mind’s Eye Academy reform camp deep in the wooded countryside somewhere outside of L.A. But wouldn’t you know it, when he gets there, he continues to be the object of assault.

Enter Kaitlin (Grace Phipps), whose radiant face and supply packed Daisy dukes are the only reason I really wanted to continue watching the movie. Harsh, sure, but true. In her own words, Kaitlin is a “wayward cheerleader” who, for some reason, takes an instant shine to our dissociative-zero-to-antihero-bad-boy Lincoln. An odd couple indeed. Even odder when we learn Kaitlin has a history of being a bully herself, and in fact, one of the gals she tortured in the past ended up killing herself as a result. Lincoln weeps, cranks up the death metal and susurrates a lame-ass diatribe about how he this music has saved his life so many times in the past, how he envisions himself rolling in a tank over piles of skulls and firing mortar-bombs at all the world as catharsis. “Awesome,” replies Kaitlin, as the two become kindred wastrels. That is, until the ghost of the girl Kaitlin bullied comes back and starts ferociously felling everyone at camp giving Lincoln the business. Yeah, really.

I’ll expound no further on the plot, except to say that as the film trudges along toward its scant runtime, a whole lot of blood starts to stain the deck. Granted, most of it is of the slit-wrist and slashed-throat variety, a la bullied suicide, but for a movie so bereft on pretty much every other conceivable front, there’s more than a modicum of gore here to oblige most horror heads. Problem remains, there aren’t many characters here to really side with, including our lead actor, and so the bloodletting has a short-lived visual impact but not a lasting emotional one. Ironic, since this Lincoln cat is just about as abjectly emo as a female Team Edward convention. And that, to me, is the major downfall of the movie…none of it truly coheres and resonates beyond the 80 odd minutes that it’s actually on the screen. Well, save for Grace Phipps’ fine behind, but I digress. Everything else, the silly story, the subpar acting, the drab photography…these are demerits no exorbitant amount of bloodshed can make up for.

So there you have it. SOME KIND OF HATE amounts to little more than gore-sodden but ultimately unmemorable low-budget indie. Aside from a healthy dose of a blood-spill and the alluring aura of one Grace Phipps (set for the new TV series “Scream Queens” later this month), there’s isn’t much else of enduring note to favorably speak of here. Really, if you want to see a much more effective take on high-school bullying, throw in Larry Clark’s BULLY, or more recently, MTV’s UNFRIENDED or even Scream The Series. Hell, Howie Deutch’s SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL packs more thrilling emotional tension than SOME KIND OF HATE. Agitated abhorrence I tell you, that’s the kind of hate this title tends to elicit.

Some Kind of Hate

NOT GOOD

4