Family Portraits Movie gets 2-Disc DVD Release

You may or may not have heard of Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America (I'll be honest, I had never heard of it before), but it may be one of the most provocative and disturbing collection of shorts to ever hit the independent market.  In a recent interview with Fangoria, Douglas Buck (the director of Family Portraits), informed the horror community that his 'trilogy' of shorts will finally be available in a 2-disc special edition DVD format.

His trilogy began with 'Cutting Moments’, which was filmed in 1996.  It ran for approximately 23 minutes and followed a suburban housewife and mother who 'shakes up' her suburban normality in a most extreme and execrable way.  1 year later Buck filmed 'Home', a slightly longer episode (29 minutes), which followed the same story, but this time from the fathers point of view.  6 years passed when Buck finally filmed 'Prologue' which ran at a much longer 50 minutes and now shadowed a young woman who returns to her hometown to confront the man who brutally attacked and mutilated her (she has a hook for a hand).

As Buck was filming 'Prologue', he began to see that these three shorts seemed to all share a common connection.  He explains further in his own words.

Not that I was aware of this or that it was foremost in my mind as I made the first two films.  But as things became clear to me, and as I became aware of what the themes really were and what I was exploring, I realized as I was going into PROLOGUE that this really was a unified statement about America. Especially since all three films deal with what’s supposed to be the foremost concern of the country today, which is the nuclear family.

From this discovery Buck decided to re-edit the shorts and unite them into one abstract and enigmatic feature.  The movies were then cut to a 2-Disc DVD set which includes all 3 shorts, in their separate form, on the 1st disc.  The 2nd disc has the feature length cut (which runs at approximately 105 minutes) as well as several extras.

This looks to be an excellent and visceral decent into the dark underbelly of the 'normal family' that a lot of us never get to see.  Although Bucks work is entirely fictional it is quite easy for one to see that these situations and characters are not only possible, but they also may just be our next-door neighbors.  That, to me, makes the movies even more terrifying than the violent content in the films.  Do yourself a favor and check out his official website where you may order the 2-Disc Special Edition of Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America.