The Hamster Cage
Larry Kent
Canada | 2005 | 92mins | 35mm | Colour

Lucy and Paul return to their childhood home for a family dinner to honour their father's up-coming Nobel Prize in physics. At first all appears normal, but then Uncle Stanley arrives with highly inappropriate presents and a 'distastefully young' fiancè named Candy.

Lucy, the first to open her gift, discovers a pair of panties meant for a little girl. She is frozen by horrific memories, but as Stanley launches into an extremely persuasive argument in defence of his paedophilia, Lucy is driven to kill him with a toilet plunger. Upon coming down from the 'high' of killing her uncle, she solicits Paul's help to bury Stanley in their pet cemetery.

But it turns out Stanley isn't as dead as they thought. As Lucy and Paul set out to re-kill and bury Stanley, each of the gifts is opened, accompanied with the story and memory it elicits. With each memory, it becomes clear the remaining members of the family must bring 'everything out into the open'. Such a bold effort can only lead to bloody disaster. The cathartic cleansing has finally taken place.