Director/Screenplay – Adam Ray Fair, Co-Director – Lyon Mitchell, Adaptation – Adam Ray Fair & Alex C. Johnson, Story – Adam Ray Fair & Jess McPeak, Producer – Alex C. Johnson, Photography – Chad Sano, Lyon Mitchell & Garrett Ware, Music – Missing Horizon, Music Composed by Marco Genovesi, Visual Effects – X Productions, Special Effects – AFX Studio & Gore Patch Bunch (Lori Hill & Billy Patterson). Production Company – Preacher Boys Productions.
Cast
Alicia Karami (Brittany), Adam Ray Fair (Hunter), Karri Davis (Adrianna), Liam Samuel Watkins (Tony), Sandra Dee Tryon (Piglady), Jeffrey Hunter (Randy), Shyvhan Storm (Marcus), Lazarus Tate (Tyler), Geno Romo (Officer Rodriguez), Alyssa Beth (Female Cop), Antonia Marie (Victim 1)
Plot
Med student Brittany, her boyfriend Hunter, her friend Adrianna and her boyfriend Tony travel up from California to Oregon to stay at the cabin owned by Hunter’s father. Hunter and Tony go off to buy a pig to roast over a bonfire that night from a piglady. The piglady and her pigs lurk in the woods. That evening, the piglady comes stalking and killing the friends, allowing her pigs to eat the remains.
Piglady is a True Crime film based on the story of Susan Monica. Monica has served in Vietnam, had run a construction firm and then bought a farm in Wimer, Oregon. In 2014, authorities were alerted when she was found using somebody else’s food stamps. A search of her property uncovered that between 2012 and 2013 she had hired two handymen to work on the property. She had then killed both of them and fed their bodies to her pigs. In 2015, she was convicted to a fifty-year jail sentence.
It becomes apparent that when it comes to Piglady the film that director/writer Adam Ray Fair has taken the basics of the Susan Monica case – a woman raising pigs on a remote farm in Oregon and feeding dead bodies to them – and essentially made the rest up. Susan Monica is only known to have killed two people, both of whom were residents on her farm. In the opening scene, we see her with a pregnant girl imprisoned and then pursuing and killing her and her baby. There is no record of such in the court case.
Monica’s reasons for killing the two men range from mercy killings to self-defence, while she had also stolen and used their food stamps. It seems a huge leap to go from that to Monica as essentially a slasher maniac wandering around the nearby area killing all and sundry and feeding them to her pigs. The film is also promoted with the untrue claim that it was shot at the actual murder scene – Susan Monica’s farm was located in Wimer, Oregon, while the film was shot in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, which is some seventeen miles away. At most the film’s tagline could be “shot in the same state as the murder scene.”
Sandra Dee Tryon as the Piglady
Essentially, Adam Ray Fair has taken the basics and turned Susan Monica into a standard slasher movie maniac a la Jason Voorhees, tromping around the woods accompanied by her pigs, alternately shooting or hacking people up with a machete and then letting her pigs devour the remains. All that is missing is some kind of hockey mask, although we never actually see the Piglady’s face.
Most of the film is not even a horror film but spends an inordinate amount of time with a quartet of twentysomethings as they get away to a cabin in the woods. A lot of this stuff feels like filler and could easily have ended on the cutting room floor. There does seem an awful lot of the film joking around about gender roles and what it takes to be a man – director Adam Ray Fair casts himself as Alicia Karami’s boyfriend, the somewhat redneck Hunter, and you get the impression that these issues were of some importance to him. The main thrust of the film kicks in about the one-hour point (about two-thirds of the way through) where it suddenly becomes a Slasher Film with the Piglady hacking and killing the cast with a moderate degree of bloodshed.
Piglady was a directorial debut for Adam Ray Fair.
