Review: Little Evil (2017)

Little Evil (2017)

Rated TV-MA

Score: 3 out of 5

Little Evil is a nice, fun way to start October: a lightweight horror-comedy riff on The Omen that's not a great movie by any stretch, but is still a better spoof than anything that's come out in a while. Its sense of humor is pretty middle-of-the-road and doesn't have a whole lot of depth or bite despite its TV-MA rating, but it works more often than it doesn't, carried along by a solid cast led by Adam Scott, Evangeline Lilly, and a show-stealing Bridget Everett. Movies like this are the exact sort of things that normally make a healthy $60-80 million at the American box office before going into circulation on cable, and this is a solid example of that sort of populist comedy. There's really not a whole lot to describe lest I ruin the jokes, but it's still a more-than-acceptable way to spend ninety minutes with your own couch, your own popcorn, and -- since it comes courtesy of Netflix -- only your choice of friends and family watching with you rather than a crowd of people yapping on their cell phones.

Gary and Samantha Bloom are a young, newly-married couple in suburban Pennsylvania, the former a realtor and the latter a stay-at-home housewife raising Lucas, a son from a previous relationship. Strange things happen around Lucas; he rarely speaks, he likes to dig up earthworms, he watched quietly when a tornado ruined Gary and Samantha's wedding day, and he told his science teacher to go to hell, upon which she poured lye on her face and jumped out the window to her death. But hey, all kids are brats, as Gary's buddy and co-worker Al, himself the stepfather of a disrespectful teenager, can readily attest. As such, it takes some time for Gary to recognize that his son being the Antichrist isn't just a turn of phrase to describe his behavior. But eventually, things get too weird to write off as merely the behavior of a kid acting out, especially once Gary learns that Samantha hadn't been entirely forthcoming about that cult she was involved in when she was in her twenties. Having never trusted Lucas despite all efforts to reach out to him and be a dad, Gary decides that he has to die if the world is to be saved... until his feelings as a stepfather come creeping in, leading Gary, whose own father abandoned him as a child, to decide that he's not gonna let Lucas' biological father (for a certain definition of "biological") decide his fate. Unfortunately, J. D. Gospel, the leader of a local doomsday cult that Gary just sold an abandoned nunnery to, has other ideas.

This movie is mainly an excuse to watch some funny people getting on and being funny. Adam Scott is always fun to watch here as the dad Gary who's trying to reach his son, oblivious for so long to his true nature, and has some fun chemistry with Evangeline Lilly as the one who sees the good in him. We're given parodies of The Omen, The Shining, Children of the Corn, and any number of old-school religious horror flicks; a moment when Lucas lights a clown on fire at his birthday party sees Gary and his friends remark that the clown, until that point a fairly crappy one, finally got interesting. The real highlight, however, was Bridget Everett. Her character Al is a trans man with extra emphasis on the man, complete with a mancave, a love of beer, a midlife crisis monster truck, and (ironically) a disappointment that his stepson is into girly things like Pitch Perfect. Al is a guy who you'd normally expect to see someone like David Koechner playing a cisgender version of, and Everett is hysterical throughout the film, her character's sexuality only being mentioned once (when Gary remarks "oh, you're a step-dad now, cool!") but otherwise lending plenty of subtext to his jokes and actions. Clancy Brown, Sally Field, and Tyler Labine are sadly underused as, respectively, the cult leader, the social worker, and the wedding photographer turned conspiracy theorist, but it was still fun seeing their faces in this.

The plot is completely boilerplate, often veering all over the place as it moves between Gary's efforts to kill Lucas, his efforts to connect with him, and the arrival of the cultists in the third act. The humor is of primary importance, and sadly, that means that characters other than Gary and Lucas get short shrift; it was really the cast and the jokes that made this worth watching. You'll be able to guess that the reverend is evil from the moment you see him, and the story beats and ending will come as little surprise. The horror side of the film was also noticeably less effective than the comedy, relying mainly on cheap jump scares with only one scene (a neat subversion of the classic mirror scare) really landing. This is almost a film that goes out of its way to not keep the viewer up at night, and while the light tone generally works for the comedy, I do think that the film could've afforded to put some more punch behind its horror.

The Bottom Line

It's a simple, but entertaining horror-comedy that focuses a bit too much on the comedy side of the equation, but still gave me plenty of time to chill out and have some fun. If you scroll past it in your Netflix queue, give it a go.