Almost seems like two different movies stitched together

The first half was very similar to Beyond the Black Rainbow in all the right ways - quiet, deliberate, lusciously textured, almost hypnotic in its ponderous pacing and neon-soaked visuals; the story, though simple, was interesting and quite well set up, and the midway point had me expecting something like the second half of Drive...

...and then it just went into a full Tarantino slapstick splatterfest.

The story, too, seemed to make a hard U-turn. At first it seemed like there was something genuinely sinister behind the Children and their cenobites-on-wheels henchmen... but then it turns out the former were just the personal entourage not of a madman in the grasp of evil forces, but rather of a pathetic loser with pathological narcissism and a bruised ego, while the latter were just a bunch of junkies addicted to mutant wasp honey, who by the way represent exactly none of the menace their looks would seem to imply.

What a damn shame. There was some serious potential here.