Black Christmas (2019)

If there was anything I was thinking this year, “gee, I wish Blumhouse would do a new Black Christmas remake” was NOT it. But apparently what I want doesn’t matter.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Director: Sophia Takal

Starring: Imogen Poots, Cary Elwes, Aleyse Shannon

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Essentially, what this is is a bad Twitter argument about rape culture that they spent thousands turning into a movie. It’s really got no interesting insights, and the story is a bunch of crap where all the characters are barely characters so much as mouthpieces spewing all the worst arguments you’ve tuned out online this year. So why is it called Black Christmas? Well, it’s got a sorority house and a killer! That’s enough, right?

They start off with this plot about the main girl Riley, who is still traumatized after a sexual assault by some piece of shit frat guy. I am sure this very serious subject will be handled with exquisite care by this teen slasher movie they’ve created, but then, I am very stupid.

The dialogue is entirely comprised of lines where other characters talk about how much they want to remove the statue of the old racist, sexist slave-owner guy who the school is named after. Oh, and Cary Elwes is a literature professor delivering a big screed about how women are bad and need to submit to men. Then later they talk about how they hate his class because he doesn’t teach any works by women or gay people.

See what I mean? It’s like they just ripped some of the headlines off Twitter. Every fucking line in the movie is like this. If they had anything interesting to say, it’d be one thing. But it comes off like they were just like “we don’t have any ideas… QUICK! TO TWITTER! COPY AND PASTE ALL THE NEWS HEADLINES FROM BREITBART FOR THE VILLAINS’ DIALOGUE!”

Riley does see the frat dudes undergoing what looks like a satanic ritual with red cloaks and a bleeding black-blood statue and all kinds of shit. It’s even in a creepy stone chamber. I’m amazed that nobody sees her, but I guess the frat-bro magic prevents them from even seeing women. Their dick energy is just so powerful that anything else is invisible to them!

You never learned the identity of the killer in the first one and it was one of the better things about it, how fucking eerie it was. In this one, Nathan and I were just like “oh, the frat boys are the killers.” 10 minutes in, and we were right. It’s honestly barely even a spoiler. Scooby Doo would be disappointed in how easy it was to figure this out.

They do this routine on stage basically calling out the frat guys for being rapey pieces of shit. It goes better than anticipated as they get out of there just fine with no altercations. Even the text messages they get are only from the killers threatening them, which, you know, is a given in a slasher movie. These text messages, by the way, are the movie’s replacement for the deranged phone calls from the 1974 original, where the killer constantly made vile threats in voices that would make Regan from The Exorcist blush. In this one, you only get one instance of the creepy voices, and it turns out to be a glitch on an otherwise normal phone call. So lame!

The text messages are just goofy shit. It’s hardly even threatening at all – they read like an incel Batman villain or some shit, just trying way too hard to seem creepy. Boy, so glad it’s not like real life where people get harassed with much more violent, awful language and even real life threats, until they literally leave social media and have to hire bodyguards! It’s all peachy in this movie’s universe.

There’s a scene with Cary Elwes where he threatens Riley to quit speaking out about rape. She manages to accidentally see a piece of paper he’s carrying with the names of a bunch of girls on it. It’s literally right there! These guys are so fucking bad at keeping secrets that I bet when one of them cheats on their girlfriend, they just forward the texts to their girlfriend automatically. Personally I expected way more from a cult of frat bros who worship a statue that bleeds black blood. 

One of the film’s worst parts is the big argument between the girls and the one boyfriend dude. Here are some of the lines spoken: “Not all men are rapists!” “DID YOU JUST ‘NOT ALL MEN’ ME???” It’s really like the dumbest, most infantile argument you’ve seen in the Facebook comments of a Jezebel article about Brett Kavanagh.

Speaking of Kavanagh, the script even fits in the line “I like beer” from the boyfriend character. If this was any less subtle, it would just be a scroll of HuffPo headlines across the screen.

The killers start coming after them with bows and arrows, wearing black cloaks and weird metal masks. At this point I was wondering if anyone involved knew what Black Christmas was – this is more like You’re Next, except it actually makes that movie look like Citizen Kane in comparison. But hey, they have Christmas lights in there!

The final battle takes place in the creepy stone-wall dungeon cult place, as Cary Elwes’ character delivers a big soliloquy about how white men are being oppressed and they need to take back the country from women. He goes on about how white men who agree with them will take seats in “Congress and boardrooms” and says women need to “stay in line.” It’s such a blatant, ridiculous speech that was obviously written as a huge dumb strawman. Even if you’re like me and agree that all these things Elwes’ character is saying are awful and noxious, this writing is just so garishly stupid. It’s like when you dislike someone and try to make them sound as dumb and ridiculous as possible when telling a story about them to your friends, using funny voices and exaggerating the things they said to make them seem much worse.

I don’t even get what their plan is. So they worship this guy from the 1800s who founded their school, who was worried that men would lose their place in society to women? Maybe that guy was just able to see the future. Either way they’re a bunch of misogynists so silly that it’s hard to take seriously. They seem to think they can “restore order” and, what, make women subservient to them? They’re all still in positions of power at this college. 'Women will be subservient to men' is probably gonna be a hard sell for the administrators when things get back to normal in January, buds.

Frankly, we were just waiting for these idiots to come out wearing MAGA hats. But never fear, because the entire gang of sorority girls bust in and kick their asses! It makes that one scene in Avengers Endgame look like a subtle, restrained, literary feminist statement, but on the plus side, the movie is over.

The problem is that the writing is just so fucking bad in this. It’s so one-dimensional that it’s an insult to other very flat things. The characters aren’t characters, so much as they are mouthpieces for either side of an ideology. In the movie’s world, the frat bros are nothing but evil, scratches off Satan’s pube hair, and the girls can do no wrong and basically have zero flaws. It’s just dull, black-and-white shit. I don’t need them to put in sympathetic side to the frat bros, but they sure don’t act like anything but cartoon characters, as it is. And if it’s a cartoon, well, I rarely take cartoons that seriously.

I’d love it if this were an actual good feminist movie – I’m not writing this review to bash feminism or “defend the rights of men” or whatever the Reddit trolls would say. I think that’s actually the worst part of this. The writing is so bad that it involuntarily puts me in the same camp as those alt-right internet douchenozzles who will just hate this because a woman has more than two lines spoken. So, thanks a lot for that one, movie!

PS - The original 1974 film included a plot where the lead woman character was considering an abortion, and it was more interesting and daring than anything this movie tries. Pretty sad!

Image copyright of their original owner; I don't own it.

Cinema Freaks LIVE: Ex Machina (2015)

Here's another thing we did. This time, my friend Tony and I looked at Ex Machina, a strange sci fi film about a kid and an android interacting as part of an experiment. We found it a clever movie with some good twists, some subtle undermining of the usual stereotypes, and well done characters. Director Alec Garland has a good feel for ambiance and atmosphere, and there are a lot of beautiful settings and creepy, desolate atmospheric moments to go along with the story - accentuating it lightly like frosting on a cake.

There were a few silly moments, and maybe the movie tried too hard at times to cram in too many different genres and elements. However, I'd personally still take that over a movie that didn't do enough.

See you guys next time!

The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Black Widow and Sexism

The new Avengers movie is out, and people are angry about stuff again – more specifically the character Black Widow, and whether or not her portrayal is sexist in the movie. So, is it? Well, let's talk about that.

For those of you not in the know, I'll try and sum up peoples' problems – basically, in the movie, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and the Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) have struck up a romance between films. The first thing we really see Black Widow do is touch the Hulk's hand and help him turn back into Banner. A lot of her role in this movie is interacting with Banner. There's one scene where the two have a conversation about how they can't have a normal life together, because they can't have kids.

Now, I'm not one to try and presume anything about people with such vastly different life experiences than me. If you thought this was a sexist portrayal and they could have done it differently, I'm fine with that. I just didn't see it that way.

The thing nobody is saying about this is that Black Widow before this was a pretty generic character – she was the stoic badass tough chick with very little else to her. I know Joss Whedon wrote some great tough chicks in Buffy, but they were full, three dimensional characters, with worries, fears, individual thoughts and realistic personalities. To me it always seemed like Black Widow was just a cardboard cutout of a character, although Johansson did a good job portraying her especially in the second Captain America flick.

Now, in this new one, she does kinda have a character – she's in love with Bruce Banner. And no, a woman character being in love with a guy is not the only way to show character. But the way she acts in this movie is refreshingly honest and down to Earth for a Marvel flick. You can believe her character and you feel sympathy for her, as cheesy and simple as the romance is – it works. I can see why people think it's sexist for a female character to be based solely around being in love with a man, but frankly, Bruce Banner doesn't have any other plot in The Avengers 2 besides being in love with her, either. It goes both ways.

If it were a much older movie and Banner was portrayed as the uncaring, stoic, manly-man character who was complex and full-bodied, while Black Widow was portrayed as a wishy-washy emotional female, then I'd probably be on the other side of the argument. But as is, it's just a fairly decent portrayal of two people caring about each other.

The one scene people are complaining the most about is when Banner says he can never have a normal life, have kids, etc. She matches him and says she can't have kids because she was a trained assassin and they sterilized her. The line is “you still think you're the only monster on this team?” It comes off to me as two people trying to relate to one another and connect – it was fine. Some people, I guess, thought that scene suggested Black Widow's character was only wanting kids, etc – stereotypical, cliche woman stuff, which seemed sexist and outdated to them.

What people overlook in all of this is that being in love and wanting kids and everything IS realistic, and it can make for a good, interesting story. It brings out the softer sides of characters – in a superhero flick, that's pretty important. While some writers can certainly come off as sexist by not fleshing out their women characters enough, I think Whedon did it fine within the constraints of Marvel Studios' ridiculously anal-retentive control game over their movies.

So what exactly is the root of the problem here? I just think sometimes people can take their eye off the ball – they make it more about politics than about character, and their sight can be a bit too narrow. A lady can certainly have a love interest and her character can be sad when the guy is in trouble or whatever else – that's a human emotion and it adds depth. Trying to make it so women can only be tough, bad ass, stand-alone sirens of war who don't need men is just tipping the scale too far in the other direction from the old cliché of the weak-willed, subservient women characters of the 60s and 70s. You've got to have a medium. At some point, you just have to quit worrying about it and write the best character you can.

There's also the Internet mentality of “well, if you're not X, you must be Y” - like, if Whedon didn't write the most complex, individual, independent and unique woman in a movie ever (every time he does something, too), he's a misogynist – like it can only be one or the other. There's just no grey area with the Internet, and in everything in real life, there's tons of grey area. People aren't just one thing or the other. Not everything has to advance the same single agenda or else it's the opposite of that agenda. That's kind of a childish way to look at the world.

If you're only writing one type of character, chances are, you're a bad writer. Women, like men, can be sensitive, they can be tough, they can be easy to anger or they can be chill and relaxed – they're human beings, and a good writer pays more attention to the human emotion of a character rather than trying to fill a quota by making X number of characters whatever personality type.

And it's a tough thing to really balance out and measure – how do you balance out the expectations of an audience that wants equality, but with so many different ideas of how to do it? You also have to take into account that, with a movie like this, where a lot of kids are watching - some of them young girls - you need to have a good role model type of character. It's a sensitive issue, and I can see why people want to talk about it and debate it.

There's obviously a problem in Hollywood with having good, well written ladies in the movies. There are some, especially when you get down to more independent films – it's not an epidemic or a total void of quality. But in terms of real mainstream, well done female heroines, we could definitely always do better. So if that's your argument, well, I don't have a problem with that – just put away the torches and the pitchforks on Whedon. I mean, damn, he isn't that bad. 

And listen - everyone, and I mean everyone, is allowed to have some opinion on this. Our personal experiences shape our viewpoints on everything, social issues, politics, etc. Some people, women or men, may see the movie as sexist or whatever else, and maybe they're not entirely wrong. But do you have to shut people out who disagree with you? Feminists telling a bunch of straight white dudes to shut up are just as wrong as misogynistic assholes telling women their problems aren't big deals - they're all wrong. Just, fuck, don't be a dick about it. You don't have to have a final, line-in-the-sand answer to every question. Sometimes viewpoints are still evolving and you don't have to be sure of everything.

With that said, though; yeah, we really do need a Black Widow stand alone movie. Get on that, Marvel, you bastards.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Nostalgia, Ghostbusters and the Movies

If you've been on any movie or entertainment site lately, you probably want to kill yourself because of all this Ghostbusters news. If you haven't been, I'll sum it up in the most non-wrist-slittingly-way possible: Sony, that master of franchises, wants to put out a Ghostbusters movie with an all female cast. The Internet reacted poorly as it always does. I personally just thought it was at least something different from a remake with an all male cast, which would just be contrived as hell, so eh, whatever.

But lo and behold...

I swear it's like they're just trying to spite me now.

It's the nostalgia dollar at work again. People just love stuff from when they were kids now. I'm a 20-something millennial whatever, so I can speak from experience – we all just love remembering the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s. Why? I think it's a product of the Internet, fast moving technology and what it's all doing to our poor, putty-like brains.

With the Internet, time moves faster and people are closer together. We grew up with this Internet thing foisted on us by the over-eager minds of big tech companies. With that came the ability of hindsight to things we couldn't just watch normally without a Youtube or torrents. When people my age were young, we watched shows like everyone used to – you know, on the TV and then we had to use our memories. Nostalgia! Then Youtube came along and Netflix followed and it was all a snowball effect from there – no longer did we have to rely on just thinking about things we were nostalgic about. Now we could relive it and watch it in all its glory!

Now, even though it's not that old, we're reliving that sweet nostalgia like 80 year old men discovering childhood favorite storybooks on a trip back to our childhood home before we die of cancer. I know that sounds sardonic, but really I think it's just a human thing that everyone goes through no matter the age – we all love remembering things from when we were younger. Nostalgia doesn't have a time limit. Everything in our pasts has some kind of rosy border.

The problem came when movie studios dug their pudgy fingers into that proverbial rosy-bordered nostalgic pie. As they are wont to do, they turned it from a sort of charming, somewhat happy new trend - “we can watch all our favorite Nickelodeon cartoons on a tiny screen in our bedrooms!” - into a giant corporate megalith: the remakes and reboots we have all come to loathe more and more every year.

This is always how it goes. They listen to us, they listen to the demand – not out of some kind of love for genuine art and fun, but because they see us as money-spewing machines that will churn out dollar bills at the drop of any new movie about something we used to love. That's the corporate machinery at work. Maybe at some minuscule level someone enjoyed what they were doing, but I dunno, I just get the feeling a lot of these guys have to go visit guys wearing cowboy hats in the middle of the night and get threatened with death if they don't obey what they say:

Unfortunately, this is the way it always goes – something starts off genuine, then the big bucks come in, and it becomes a corporate, controlled version of itself. So I imagine we'll probably get a live action Hey Arnold movie with kids from various teen pop acts and maybe Shailene Woodley or Ansel Elgort thrown in as a consolation prize. Or a Rugrats movie that imitates Baby Geniuses. With dialogue written by low-rent Diablo Codys. Maybe they'll make a Powerpuff Girls movie next and then make a male version of that to appease all demographics! The possibilities!

I also just think it's strange how political pretty much everything has become thanks to the Internet. I mean, people always liked to spout off about politics, and movies have always – always – been powerful tools to espouse certain viewpoints. But with the Internet, we can make anything political now! Now, everything that comes out gets scrutinized to no end and held up or beat down by increasingly polarized, extreme opinions. When the all-women Ghostbusters idea came out, people went nuts – some people were hailing it as a victory for feminism; others just beat the old dead horse of “women can't be funny” with some bitching about "feminists ruining everything" to round out the horribleness...either way, it was a circus. Rinse and repeat with the announcement of the all-male one again.

Can't this just be a fun movie? It's fucking Ghostbusters. It was a silly 1980s comedy with great comedians in the starring roles. Now, it's a big political debate. That's what the Internet does, though – it gives all these people voices and they become so loud, they dwarf the qualities of the films we're arguing about. Movies like Ghostbusters aren't so much about the movies themselves now, so much as they are political tug-o-war talking points for feminists and anti-feminists and who the fuck ever else.

Not to say you shouldn't discuss or argue about things that bother you in these films, but you shouldn't lose perspective either. By all means, talk about feminism in movies and the all-white-male demographic of Hollywood's moneymaking elite, but not everything has to be another hurdle in the battlefield for equality – as important as it is for men and women to be equal and for there to be diversity, I just don't see Ghostbusters as being any part of that equation. I guess some people do though, so...more power to you, I guess?

(Plus, the funniest part of the whole "all male Ghostbusters cast" thing is that people have apparently forgotten that they did two movies already with an all-male Ghostbuster cast...so, whether or not you're happy with an all-male cast in some new movie, it's just hilarious that you'd act like this is some unprecedented thing. I get the idea that eventually, in an Idiocracy-esque way, people are going to forget the original Ghostbusters even existed. They'll keep on arguing about the remakes, but then go "who?" when Bill Murray's or Harold Ramis's names come up.)

I'd be lying if I said I expected greatness from a new Ghostbusters movie in 2015. But that's not even the main point, and neither is the male/female cast debate.

The point is that they're only now making any new Ghostbusters movies, because now, people think everything from their childhood is God. Why didn't they make a Ghostbusters III or spin-offs back in the 90s when the original was still fresh? Because there was no market for it then. There is one now, thanks to the nostalgia craze born from the Internet. Hollywood saw dollar signs and decided they could make money off it. That's the truth. It's commercialized, focus-tested nostalgia and it's how they do everything, from superheroes to remakes of classic horror films to now, classic childhood movies and cartoons. Nothing new under this sun, folks.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

So it’s Valentine’s Day again, that special time of the year when couples are at their happiest, pink hearts replace dollar bills as currency, and the birth rate anticipates a spike in November of the same year. Yes, it’s true this is a controversial holiday, full of all sorts of great things if you’re in a relationship, but at the same time carrying a sort of stigma – why should we only care so much on this day? Can’t we love any other time of the year as well?

Well, yes, but we can also have romantically themed slasher movies any other time of the year too. But I’m doing it now. Frankly, if you can’t trust the guy who gave you a zombie romance movie to give you a heartwarming good time on screen, who the hell can you trust?

Director: Jonathan Levine

Starring: Amber Heard, Michael Welch

IMDb

So we start off with some indie pop music and scenes of high school girls looking hot and stuff. If you're among the small, deluded part of the population who really wanted to revisit the shallowness and idiocy of "popular" high school life, you'll be in heaven with the opening scenes. For the rest of us, this is just a reminder of why it's so great that people grew out of phases like this and actually got personalities later on, like plants coming into bloom.

But another thing that's coming into bloom is Mandy Lane, played by Amber Heard. She apparently used to be a nerdy girl and then got hot over the summer. Which then gives douchebags like this the right to shamelessly flirt with her at random pool parties:

"Hur hur, I'm an alchemic mutation of every douchey guy you see at parties like this." 

He’s not very good at it or anything, mostly just kind of telling her how hot she is in a way that 99% of girls would never go for, not bothering to compliment or flatter her in any way.  So she tells that guy to fuck off. He then goes up on the roof with Teenage Edward Norton, a friend of Mandy’s who I’m sure has another name – but I’m just calling him Teenage Edward Norton. Because holy shit, it’s fucking identical. I mean if you told me he was plummeted from the Primal Fear days of the past into the present day, I'd believe you.

Teenage Edward Norton tells the jock guy they should do something cool, like jumping off the roof. Jock guy thinks that’s a pretty cool idea, so he says yes, but it turns out Teenage Edward Norton isn’t dying today! What follows is pretty much another in the long line of modern horror movie scenes that could be completely plausible wacky Yahoo! news stories: "Stupid Guy Jumps Off Roof and Kills Self in Pool."

Then people in the comments section got into a seven page debate about ethics, a topic which nobody had a real clue about.

Next scene is set nine months later, where a bunch of guys and girls are going to some barn way out in the middle of nowhere to drink and party, a plot I'm sure you've never seen in a horror movie before. The guys are all just interested in Mandy for the most part, even though there are other girls going. What ensues isn't so much a bunch of kids having a party as it is a sort of wild, feral jungle hunt, with Mandy as the presumed prey.

The first guy to make a move happens to be the black guy, Bird, who tells her he’s different from the other guys. I'm sure. I'm also sure he'll be the first one to talk about how girls only go for jackasses and how he's the only nice and sensitive guy left. Snore. He holds her hand, tries to kiss her – it’s actually pretty suave. 

That is, until Mr. Cockblock here shows up:

Yes, this born and bred farm boy is named Garth, and he will serve as … well, the hot guy who lives in the barn. Later they have a pool party and take off her top in the water, horsing around in a way that may be a little too serious for her. Luckily Garth shows up again, like a guardian angel, and shoots his gun a few times at "snakes" in the water - thereby saving Mandy's ass from becoming even more of a coveted sexual treasure than it already was.

The next candidate on the flirt train is Jake, this douchey kid who thinks he's all that because he can drink a bottle of hard liquor like a 40-year-old alcoholic. His hobbies include driving trucks in his underwear with a gun AND a bottle of liquor:

Sounds like the kind of thing Rush Limbaugh fans would be into.

And flirting with Mandy by berating her and insulting her because she doesn't find him charming. You know, the best way to get a girl. Grabbing her arm and shouting about how she thinks she's better than everyone else? That will win her over for sure.

But this isn't just a speed dating game - it's a horror film. In true slasher fashion, we get some pretty gruesome kills, such as this girl, who finds out that a gun in her mouth isn't as fun as having a dick in her mouth:

An actual good kill scene, WHAT'S THAT?!

(Note: I'm not being sexist here. The previous scene that girl was in, she was sucking off that Jake kid! Don't shoot the messenger. The movie is the one with the obvious symbolism!)

And then we get Bird, who gets his eyes slit rather bloodily and then stabbed several times in the back:

"No, I hate knives being run over my face without actually touching me! AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!"

He at least gets in some good punches before he dies. That isn't something you see very often in slashers. I mean even in Jason Takes Manhattan, the fights were all pretty one sided. But I guess Young Edward Norton as the killer here isn't quite as imposing as Jason Voorhees, so it makes sense.

The last kill of the movie, among the main characters anyway, is the shallow blonde bimbo of the group, Chloe, who gets stabbed in the gut by Mandy herself. That's right; Mandy was in on it the whole time with Young Edward Norton. Apparently they were in some sort of weird suicide serial killer pact thing, which thankfully isn't elaborated on too much. It would really cheapen it if there were some kind of big explanation to this whole plot with tons of flashbacks. The implications are scarier than anything the movie could show you. Partially because it's so realistic; this kind of stuff could happen in real life.

And the social commentary in the film is spot on too. This is a movie about how young girls are treated. All the boys in this movie are so driven towards getting Mandy and her virginity that it becomes basically what every pretty high school girl goes through: a hunt, in which she is viewed as a piece of meat, a trophy to be won. She isn't a person at all to most everyone, including the girls in the group; she's just something to be idolized. A pretty face and a curvy body. Hell, even the girls find her attractive, as demonstrated in this scene:

There's nothing immediate that can be done to stop this, as unfortunately there's no way from controlling the thoughts of young teenagers. But it's an important problem to be aware of, as this kind of shallow objectification of someone based on her sex is something that affects a lot of girls. Whether it's the "hot" ones who get told they're not worth engaging on any level beyond a purely trashy physical, looks-based one, or every other girl who feels like less of a person because they aren't idolized that way - it's a problem among our young people.

The solution the movie offers us is simple: get together with your psychotic friend and kill the offending parties off. Like the classic horror films, it takes a social ill and pours tons of blood, guts and bile all over it, attacking it viciously like a rabid dog. This is totally in-line with any of the greats of the past. I don't think it's as raw or shocking as those films were, but All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has something to say and says it well, in the classic horror style.

But hey, maybe I'm looking too deep into this. Maybe some of the film's critics have a point.

Seriously. It's a fuckin' movie about high school kids. When do they ever put thought into why they like someone? The shallowness of high school physical attraction is in full force here. Why do we need to give Amber Heard's character some kind of in depth personality? The film doesn't need that at all. It's intentional that she seems like a dull character, because she isn't a character to the other people she's with - she's a blank slate to project their sexual desires and insecurities onto. That's what the movie was about.

And yeah, the director's a pervert; that's why the film was showing any shots of even the most remote female nudity ... not for any kind of meaning or point. And since the director is a pervert, that's why the character of Mandy was sexualized and shown in so many nude and sex scenes. Oh wait, she never even took her top off. You're an idiot.

I mean, I get it; if you found the film dull or whatever ... there's nothing I can do about that. It's just personal taste. If you didn't like the story or the way the twist unfolded ... well, that's your own thing. But at least try and understand what a film was attempting to do. You can still hate it, but at least be informed in your hate of it. I dunno, people will like and hate whatever they want. But I just don't think some of these responses hit anywhere close to what the film was trying to achieve. It's not even a really difficult message to get. It's quite un-sutble.

Even more baffling is the second contingent of people, who are obviously intellectual pillars of their communities:

Part of the dark genius of the film is that it brings out that ugly side of people, and they don't even realize it. The people making these comments are doing the exact thing the movie is fighting against. This kind of overly critical body-shaming crap is the exact message the film is lampooning and bringing to light. All that's missing from these comments is a declaration that women should remain in the kitchen or the bedroom at all times. And following that in this movie's universe, a mass butchering of everyone in a five-mile radius.

And even aside from that ... anyone who can't see why people would be attracted to Amber Heard is trying too fuckin' hard. She's a beautiful woman, and that's that.

So this is a good movie. It's a great recitation of the slasher genre that brings something new to the mix. Along with Teeth, it's one of the best feminist horror/thriller movies in quite some time, with a great message and an even greater, bloodier, more visceral way of showing it. But people didn't get it, and instead crap films like Drag Me to Hell or the latter-day SAW sequels got all the press while good films like this one wallowed in obscurity. Just more proof that horror fans have no clue what they're talking about.

I think this movie kicks ass, and I recommend it to anyone interested in good horror movies. Go see it.

All images copyright of their original owners; I do not own any of them.