The second day of Popcorn Frights was capped off by a 35th anniversary screening of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, always a welcome treat in my book. It followed on from two movies that ranged widely in both themes and quality, producing a night that ultimately went two-for-three.
Unfortunately, the crap was front-loaded last night.
Pretty Boy (2021)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
The direction and aesthetic of Pretty Boy were trying so hard to prop up a terrible script, it's frankly amusing. The visuals and the music alone were enough to create a credible retro-'80s atmosphere and carry the film for most of its length, but like so many other retro-'80s slasher throwbacks from Bloody Homecoming to Sorority Party Massacre, it is an utter mess by any other measure. The story was a mélange of clichés with zero connective tissue that randomly turned from a slasher horror-comedy about a guy hacking up Hollywood douchebags in the first half to a movie about the creepy parents of that killer in the second half, and the shift was so jarring that it made the entire first half feel pointless. The characters were either dull or unlikable, the twists in the third act felt like shock value for its own sake, and it was apparently a sequel to another film called Blind from two years ago, which the film tries to get the viewer up to speed on in the opening credits but which does nothing to give the film any measure of coherence, especially given how little the first half has to do with it. It's at least somewhat better shot than those films I mentioned earlier, with some amusing gags in the first half and neat kills that didn't feel like they were holding back, but otherwise, I was able to tell fifteen minutes in that I was not going to like this movie, and it did nothing to change my mind afterwards.
The film follows on from the events of Blind, in which a stalker in a white tux, a blond wig, and a mask of a handsome young boy kidnaps an actress named Faye who had been left blind by a botched surgery and murders all of her friends. The first half of this film, in which he stops at a home in the Hollywood Hills and murders the people inside who are hanging out for a Valentine's Day party, has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Faye is an immobile presence for most of the first half, asleep and tied up to the point that she barely feels like a character so much as an object. The characters are so flat and unlikable as to read like a parody of the kinds of assholes who exist to get hacked to death in slasher movies, the only ones who got any measure of depth or texture being the singer-songwriter, the flamboyantly gay producer who owns the house, and the girl who's cheating on her boyfriend. Tonal shifts are all over the place, the film randomly veering from horror-comedy in the scenes of "character development" to creepy moodiness when the killer was doing his thing, and while many scenes worked in isolation, that's all that the first half felt like: a collection of scenes strung together with the thinnest semblance of a plot. I was enjoying myself to some degree in the first half, but mainly because I was shutting off my brain, giving up any care I had for the protagonists, and enjoying some admittedly cool kills and funny moments, most notably a sex scene where the woman in the equation is the dumbest airhead you can imagine.
My amusement dried up considerably in the second half, when the killer is done stalking the house, Faye gets free, seeks shelter with some neighbors, and emerges as the central character, and it turns out that none of what we saw in the first half mattered because none of those characters show up again. Twists here were so telegraphed that I don't even know that they were supposed to be twists, especially the fact that the elderly couple who rescue Faye are presented in the most sinister way possible from the word "go", letting you know immediately that they have some kind of connection to the killer. The film did a good job of getting me to hate them, but nothing to help me get invested in Faye's predicament, which turned into just shock value for its own sake as she is locked in her deranged stalker's basement while his parents feed his worst impulses. There was a good movie to be made here about bad parenting and how we coddle sex-obsessed young men (a thought that's been going through my head after that shooting in Plymouth, England recently), but that would've required jettisoning the entire first half and giving a lot more development to the killer and his parents -- and possibly removing some twists that felt like they were there solely to make the film more "edgy" and because other, better horror movies used similar twists for their villains.
The Bottom Line
This isn't the worst retro slasher I've ever seen, not when it actually delivers on some of the fun within the genre, but the best parts are front loaded and the movie as a whole is a jumbled mess. Skip it.
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The second movie, fortunately, was enough to wash away the bad taste even before we got to Jason Lives.
We Need to Do Something (2021)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Based on a novella by Max Booth III, who also wrote the script, We Need to Do Something is a small-scale, low-key survival thriller that gradually turns into something more exotic and horrifying as the film goes on. It starts with a simple premise, that of a family taking shelter in their bathroom during a storm and finding themselves trapped inside when a tree blocks the door out, slowly developing cabin fever as the father's alcoholism, the daughter's romantic relationship with a classmate whose life she fears for, and the ability of rattlesnakes to find their way into the bathroom all cause tensions within to quickly boil over. As time goes on, however, it becomes clear that something much bigger and stranger is going on, something that the film communicates to us while still remaining firmly grounded in something resembling reality, walking a fine line by relying heavily on one of the oldest tricks in the horror movie book: less is more. This film makes the most of a low budget and pandemic production restrictions to build a low-key chiller that slowly ratchets up the intensity the more it reveals about what's really happening, told through two terrific lead performances and expert use of atmosphere.
The film's two anchors are Pat Healy as the father Robert and Sierra McCormick as the teenage daughter Mel. Robert is a classic patriarch, a man of the house who always takes charge, and as such, as his attempts to get the family out of the bathroom fail, he is the first one to start cracking, feeling increasingly helpless in the face of the situation he and his family are stuck in. Alcoholism is very strongly implied on his part, especially as he starts chugging mouthwash and even sucking on sanitary wipes for their rubbing alcohol content, doing no good for his physical or mental health as he starts visibly deteriorating over the course of the film. His wife Diane, played by Vinessa Shaw, is somebody who's trying to be the voice of reason, but is succumbing to despair herself as things constantly go wrong and her husband spirals out of control. The real meat of the story, however, comes with Mel, who it turns out may be directly responsible for all of the problems she and her family are facing, and not just in a metaphorical sense. You see, she and her girlfriend Amy were into witchcraft, and tried to cast a spell on a boy who was sexually harassing them in order to get him to stop. Without spoiling anything, as the film goes on and more of Mel's recent past is revealed in flashbacks, not only does it become clear that the spell probably worked, but that Mel and Amy's amateur use of magic had consequences far beyond anything they could have dreamed of, and that she's the reason why they aren't hearing any sirens or their neighbors after several days, and why there seems to be some strange, animalistic thing hanging around outside the house.
It's amazing how well this film managed to combine witchcraft and monsters with a very natural, ultra-realistic feel and tone without sucking the unnatural feel out of them. Outside of hallucinations towards the end, Mel and Amy's witchcraft is presented without any embellishment or special effects, and the monster outside the bathroom stalking the family is never once shown, only heard as it stomps around and in one scene kills the first search and rescue people to show up at the house. It is heavily implied that the monster is some kind of man-dog werebeast hybrid, between what it sounds like and what we learn about Mel and Amy's spell, but the exact nature of the horror is never shown, leaving enough ambiguity to let the mind fill in the horrifying blanks. The ambient noises heard throughout the film, specifically the lack of certain sounds one would normally associate with a suburban neighborhood be it normally or after a natural disaster, creates a sense that something is wrong as well as actually showing the devastation outside would have, and again lets the viewer guess what might have happened while providing enough clues to send those thoughts in some scary directions. The closed setting leaves the viewer trapped with the protagonists as they fall apart, some faster than others, building up to some grisly special effects work as they reach the ends of their ropes towards the end.
The Bottom Line
A nice little thriller that's hiding some devious secrets, We Need to Do Something isn't an easy watch, but it was a worthwhile ride. Check it out.
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