Three 'other choices' for a Halloween film to enjoy

 

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It's very close to Halloween 2025, and Plan9Crunch offers three somewhat offbeat choices for a Halloween-night flick to lend mood to the sinister season.

We only provide capsule reviews to these films. Perhaps we will explore them in greater detail one day. But we invite our readers to watch these gems.

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First is The Ape, 1940 (above), starring Boris Karloff. This is a Monogram poverty-row film and frankly, Karloff gives only about 50 percent in the film. However, Karloff at 50 percent is still pretty good. It's a kind of mad doctor role, with Boris as an aging doctor obsessed with curing the paralysis of a lovely polio victim. He'll stop at nothing, and, courtesy of those bizarre fever-dream Monogram plots, the good doctor decides to slip into the skin of a recently killed circus ape. He goes off as an "ape" and kills people for their spinal fluid. It's crazy but a fun hour or so to kill. This film is free on just about every stream or video service on the Internet.

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Next is The Ghost of Yotsuya, 1959 (above). This is a classic Japanese story about an amoral samurai who murders the father of the girl he lusts after. With his criminal friend they cover up the crime and the samurai marries the daughter. His friend marries her sister. A year or so later, impoverished and with a baby, the samurai, tired of poverty, murders his wife and their baby. Again, his friend is a confederate in this. The samurai marries a rich heiress, but discovers that his betrayed first wife has become a ghost. She won't leave him alone in her quest for retribution. This film can be rented on various streaming sites.

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Finally, we have The Mystic, 1925 (above). This was one of Tod Browning's more obscure silents until it was released as part of a three-film Browning Blu-Ray recently. It involves a group of Roma in Hungary. One is a fake mystic. A traveling con man catches their act and takes the group to the United States to bilk a heiress out of her fortune. But once there, the con man develops a conscience, and wants to call off the swindle. Naturally, his confederates are not pleased.

This film stars two now-obscure actors, Aileen Pringle as the fake mystic Zara, and Conway Tearle as Michael Nash, the con man. Browning always portrayed carnival life so well as he once worked in carnivals. For those who have seen a very young Joan Crawford in Browning's The Unknown, Pringle is a more mature, cynical and sexual version. She's quite striking and compelling in the role. Tearle occupies a role that usually would go to Lon Chaney. He's no Lon Chaney, but he knows that and doesn't overact. He ultimately gives a solid performance. You can rent this film on streaming services and it can be found -- for now -- free on YouTube.

So enjoy these three films, and Happy Halloween

-- Doug Gibson

40 More Cult Movies offered up by film scholar Jon Towlson

 

Review by Doug Gibson

A while back I reviewed on Plan9Crunch blog Jon Towlson's 40 Cult Movies. It was an informative 21st Century version of the fascinating cult movies books Danny Peary produced in the 1980s. You can read the review here. Mr. Towlson is a Britiah academic who has many genre books published. He has written screenplays, worked on films, including directing and acting. His Amazon page is here.

Our YouTube page, Plan9Crunch, has interviewed Towlson. The most recent interview was right around the time a sequel, 40 More Cult Movies, was published. Perhaps tongue in cheek, Towlson told me with a smile that he embarked on the second cult movies book in part because I had suggested it in the 40 Cult Movies review.

Whatever his inspiration, 40 More Cult Movies is another interesting provocative read in which Towlson recounts unique films worthy of a cult. One film I want to highlight is a too-overlooked horror film that would be ideal for an October rental or buy. It's Frankenstein (2015) directed by Bernard Rose, who includes the 1992 cult horror film, Candyman, in his resume.

Set in 2015 and shot in the Los Angeles area, I agree with Towlson that this Frankenstein is the finest film adaptation of the original novel. Scientists create an attractive young man and provide him an infant's brain. DNA starts to corrupt and the creation (Adam) becomes grotesque. Overcoming an attempt by his creators to euthanize him, he traverses the rural and urban wastelands of Los Angeles seeking love, which he associates with a female scientist who helped create him.

There are nods to the Universal classic. One includes Adam befriending a young girl and then rescuing her after tossing her in a lake. Police regard him as a criminal and shoot a dog he befriended. Eventually caught, Adam calls the woman scientist "mother" and the police notify her. But she denies knowing him.

Adam has super-human strength and cannot be kept in captivity. In a poignant scene he tells police his name is "Monster" because that's what people call him. Later Adam encounters a friend, a blind street person played by Tony Todd, of Candyman. Adam is a vulnerable creation, seeking acceptance from his creators and those whom he enclunters. They are invariably repulsed by him, fear him, and ironically help prompt Adam to becoming a "monster" who kills.

Towlson has a strength of drawing societal mores and perceptions to film. In his review of Frankenstein (2015) he writes this:

"While Boris Karloff's 1931 creature stood in for war veterans, unemployed homeless men and homosexuals increasingly persecuted as a result of the 'sex crimes' panics which swept through the United States during the Depression, Rose's Monster is representative of the urban poor in modern America. His allegorical function is emphasized by his seeming indestructibility: he repeatedly returns to life after attempts are made to kill him, seeking redress from a society that demonises him and others who are similarly disenfranchised."

Besides providing interesting analysis, Frankenstein (2015) is simply a damn good 89-minute film that merits a cult following. It can be viewed streamed on Amazon Prime and Xumo.

There are 39 other films in 40 More Cult Movies. Tthe lineup will keep cult film fans reading through the early-morning hours. They include: Basket Case; The Black Cat (1934); The Crazies (1973); Curse of the Cat People; Dawn of the Dead (1978); Deathdream; Last House on the Left (1972); I Was a Teenage Wolfman; Rosemary's Baby; The Sorcerers; Targets; Tourist Trap; Witchfinder General. ...

You want to know the rest of the movies featured? Get the book.

Here is Jon Towlson's most recent interview on Plan9Crunch YouTube page.

Here is our first Jon Towlson interview on Plan9Crunch YouTube page.

Good Boy (2025), A Lynchian Hound-Led Halloween Film

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

This article includes some spoilers, mostly labeled in advance.

 

Good Boy 2025 (there have been other films by this same title in 2022 and 2023) is essentially a haunted house movie where the dog is the main character whose perspective and reactions frame our understanding of the story and dictate its trajectory. This is the directorial debut of Ben Leonberg, the real life owner of the dog, Indy, and it has a very small cast mainly consisting of Indy (the name is the same for his character), his owner Todd, and a couple other characters. (Leonberg has directed shorts and has credentials for both receiving a degree in filmmaking as well as teaching filmmaking to others, but a first feature film is still a milestone.)

 

From the moment I learned this movie existed, it was one of my most anticipated movies of the year, and, having learned more about it, I find it very impressive. The film took about three years to film because Indy is just a normal dog, not a trained actor, and, if you watch the film in theaters right now, there will be a section at the end where Leonberg talks about how they shot some of those scenes.

 

Review

 

The film is incredibly atmospheric, firmly planting you in a vulnerable perspective. The camera is low to the ground as it is for Indy, who is also the only character that the camera does close-ups for. The sound design plays up the sound of house creaks and windshield wipers because that is how it would be for the dog (also the flickering and pulsing of lights viscerally follows the flow of the supernatural). However, it would be imprecise to say that Indy is the POV character as the camera follows him rather than protruding from his intentions. We see the shadows come into view behind him a few seconds before he senses them so we are in a privileged perspective relative to Indy, where we know what might happen, but we are still stuck on his level unable to do anything to change what he is going through.

 

The film to prove this point also mixes reality with the surreal, ripping us from Indy’s nightmares to a Shadow Man’s hunt for Indy to dreamlike visions of another dog. Consequently, this is at least a little Lynchian; I do not expect great debate over that point. More than anything else, the film wants you to be able to feel the horror it creates without a grounding human presence (human faces are largely out of focus in this movie to allow Indy to step up as the true star), and so Leonberg’s directing takes literally every opportunity it can to build and codify that suspense. 

 

However, that is where it becomes very important that the POV character is not technically Indy but us along for the ride. As Leonberg reveals if you stay to the end of the theater experience, they did not have Indy act out these scenes or respond to scary stimuli (they lured him around the set with quacking noises); they are just constantly juxtaposting suspense with Indy’s neutral face to get a response. This is not mathematical precision but a function of the audience establishing emotional continuity, and I get the sense that Leonberg felt like if he eased up even a little on the suspense at all, the illusion might be shattered. (At only 72 minutes, even if you find the game tiresome, it is not that long.) 

 

Personally, I found that formula effective the entire time, but there is also eventually some progression. Consistently, the film executes its scares through lingering on juxtaposing images until something appears in the background like Michael Myers, then pulling back to Indy’s movements, entrenching you in a slow building suspense. Then, late into the movie, it hits you with two back to back jumpscares when the threat becomes more tangible. From this point onward, the reality defying visions and distortions of physical object permanence get more frequent, pulling us deeper into the house and its secrets.

 

Though this all is very interesting, the meat of my reviews are usually the logical consistency of characters and plot, but, while there is a lot to talk about with that, it is also very difficult because of the Lynchian nature of this film’s presentation and its leading man. The movie does not have the capability to explain the details of the haunting as they occur because Indy is a dog, just weaving him through open-ended imagery, confrontations with a Shadow and increasing stakes and obstacles all while still showing him yawn, piss, eat, whine, bark and sleep.

 

 

Interlude

 

I am about to discuss some of the finer details of the movie’s plot, but I will give you every opportunity to leave before I get to those details. First, I should say that I do not think any embargo exists on spoiling this film especially if doesthedogdie.com was allowed to report on this movie before the official release, and, even if it does, I am not any kind of official reviewer of horror media that gets early screenings on contract to withhold specific details or negative criticism. The only reason I got to see this on the 2nd and not the 3rd is because theaters around me had the film open today. Any civilian could have joined me, and any conversation we have in a public forum would have the potential to be this in depth. I strongly advise you not to read the rest of this if you have not seen the movie yet. In a year of great movies, this is still a remarkable experience you should not deprive yourself of. 

 

In any case uh, when I got to the theater, I was alone and then realized the full extent of my actions; I was watching an atmospheric indie horror movie not only in a party of one but in a completely empty theater. And then for some asinine reason, a Lego commercial decided to use zombies to make its pitch (I don’t like zombies). Before it could prime me for terror too much, I realized the commercial was self-defeating. These were not Haitian Zombies (which I tolerate) but Romero Ghouls, and they, stuck within their involuntary impulses, started to gravitate toward the Lego commodities, literally replicating the critique of consumerism that is Dawn of the Dead but unintentionally this time. 

 

Anyway, the film still did suck me into its POV, but I was not terrified. It was more a feeling of resignation to whatever was going to play out. I have stalled long enough. Proceed beyond this point if you wish, but do not say I did not give you every opportunity to avoid spoilers.

 

(Some of) The Plot

 

The film starts with a cold open demonstrating Indy’s perceptiveness and Todd’s illness, splicing in organic exposition to show the backstory of these two characters. Indy, as an expressive character growing in knowledge over the course of the story, does enforce his will on the plot in ways to make him a three dimensional character. Indy’s loyalty to Todd is the central idea to this story, motivating most of the scenes. Though I hesitate to fit it into the traditional Hero’s Journey structure, Indy crosses a threshold exiting the car and going into the scary house because Todd asks him to, and Indy will fight more to save Todd than for his own survival.

 

Following the cold open health episode, after they discharge Todd from the hospital, he decides to leave his apartment and go to his deceased grandfather’s house complete with a graveyard of his many family members that died young in the forest nearby. The grandfather’s house functions as a Gothic Old Dark one, and, while the entity seems to be following Todd there, it becomes clear that his grandfather’s death and the reputation of weird happenings at this house are tied to this. Todd’s name means death, so the stakes are clear.

 

As ghostly visions of a Shadow Man and an older dog correspond to opening doors and disembodied whining, Indy will have to figure out what happened to the grandfather and his dogs and what awaits them in the cellar. Todd, to an extent, is in his own movie getting denied a certain type of healthcare and using candles and incense for homeopathic therapy. When they go into the forest, a character in the distance reveals he is a foxhunter and offers warnings to our heroes.

 

Still, Todd isolates from society and his sister, and barely interacts with the foxhunter, going deeper into the possession of the Shadow, even shutting Indy out from being able to help him to increasing degrees. In these lonely moments, the dog Bandit enters the story, overlaying his memories with our experience of Indy’s perception (we view Bandit and Indy overlaid after Indy finds projections of Bandit’s bloody bandana, and Indy proceeds as if he genuinely perceived those events happening). The Shadow Man’s aura is pervasive; cutting through Bandit’s scenes by being the villain of that story to the point that it took me embarrassingly long to realize that the wisest interpretation of those scenes was that Bandit is actually a good guy.

 

I mentioned there are two back to back jump scares, and I will clarify that on a set-up and pay-off level, one of those is easily predictable because one of the horror movie VHS on the television screen shows that type of scare happening. The foxhunter also repeatedly foreshadows that fox traps are in the area, which we see pay-off late into the movie. The storytelling in that regard is careful, so I really do not know what to do with “Indy has a chain on him that he can’t remove that suddenly transfers to being around Todd” except for magic, unreliable narration or some kind of subtextual reading.

 

I like things to make sense, but I also cannot tell you how much of those confrontations with the Shadow and Bandit were dreams (dogs sleep a lot throughout the day). The ending is actually probably the best place to further that discussion, but the original disclaimer about spoiling the plot would magnify when discussing the ending. Please do not finish this essay before watching the movie, but it is here for when you do.

 

The Ending (Major Spoilers Past Here)

 

I know the discourse surrounding this movie very much relies on the notion that the dog’s survival is the only acceptable and watchable conclusion. (Some have gone even further, declaring that nothing bad can happen to the owner either because it would make the dog sad or that nothing at all should happen to scare the dog, at which point we don’t even have a movie.) However, I have had a more nuanced perspective this entire time. From a dog’s perspective, Indy fighting tooth and nail to his very last and saving his owner, then dying in his arms, would be a glorious worthy end. Even so, there is a logistical error.

 

What can a dog do to defeat a ghost/demon? Dogs may very well be the most pure creatures on this Earth, but the utility of a horror movie based around them is their comparative powerlessness, physically, emotionally and intellectually. I praised the Lynchian dreams before, but with those come questions about the true nature of what he is facing. The flashes of supernatural situations snapping back into the mundane, are they just visions, or does Indy, with the memory of a dog, merely forget fighting his way out, or is it Todd or Bandit saving him most of those times? Each of those means a different thing.

 

 

Going back into the film, the dialogue between Todd and his sister Vera would probably clarify more about what happened to their grandfather, and it is possible I might be able to find something more out about how much power Bandit has as a potential Big Good/Mentor character in this story, but there are deliberate holes here at least to my understanding. I have previously reviewed the atmospheric Noriaki Yuasa directed The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch, which had a similar amount of supernatural and mundane wire crossing that led to logical questions about how the plot actually happens. The contradictions made Sayuri necessarily an unreliable narrator, but I posited that because it was the villain casting doubt on her perspective and Shojo manga (the source material’s genre) focuses on systemic lack of trust in women and girls, the decision was done to match supernatural events to mundane subtext (https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/09/plan9crunch-review-snake-girl-and.html). Whether or not that makes sense, we need to consider what else this movie is saying than just “here’s a dog and his owner and a Shadow Man trying to kill them.”

 

Alright if you’re still here, you get to read the ending now (I just can’t shake you, huh). Indy survives, but Todd does not. Todd finally understands the full scope of what is happening to him as he melts into the goopy skeletonized Shadow Man, praising Indy as a good boy but telling him he can’t save him. Vera arrives and finds Indy, with the implication that she takes him with her. I still have not spoiled that much about the individual scenes and set-pieces, but I genuinely cannot help myself trying to at least pose some interpretations for this movie. (It was really jarring to see Indy fail to save Todd, but I think it makes sense and also might hint at deeper subtext.)

 

Now, I am pretty sure the Shadow Man was in the cold open, and, even if he weren’t, the physical symptoms of Todd and his grandfather match as well as their ultimate fates. The affliction, whatever it is, affects Todd young, as many of his relatives in the graveyard have died young. There is also a non-zero chance that his grandfather is the Shadow Man, and the idea of Todd becoming his grandfather symbolically has some directorial merit to it. The grandfather predominantly appears through his VHS tapes in the television screen, but there is a notable scene framing Todd’s anguished head in the screen where his grandfather’s would be. Up until that point in the movie, that is technically the clearest view of Todd’s face. (Until the end, no human character gets to really show their face, which matches the Shadow Man in aesthetic.)

 

These similarities mean something, and, though this is a supernatural movie, pending a rewatch, I think it is a valid interpretation that the reason this film has an unreliable narrator that cannot save the day might be because any inheritable affliction that causes Todd to die young would be horrific for a dog to see. Indy grew up as Todd’s dog and now has to witness this dramatic decline of mental and physical health. As I write this, I am having difficulty locating what would necessarily change if this film were just an artistic depiction of a dog’s perspective on his owner’s decline and death. Let me put it this way. Lynchian works meld the mundane and macabre into a surreal dreamlike existence that makes you question how much of what you are witnessing is actually a dream. That mechanism would also work in the inverse; how much of these supernatural happenings are just the way that a dog sees the mundane events?

 

Throughout the movie, Todd coughs up blood, but he also takes unspecified damage to his arm (Indy notices a bandage), sleepwalks, bangs his head on the wall, stops breathing, witnesses himself sleeping and merges in and out with the violent Shadow Man. This is a verifiable cacophony of physical and mental symptoms to where I would not even attempt a diagnosis, but a hereditary illness is killing him and robbing him of his sanity, with his last moment being declarative clarity that nothing can save him. Can you really tell me that I am wrong for wondering if there is a more literal meaning for all of this?

 

Conclusion

In summation, this is a very moving and suspenseful movie positioning us with the dog while also maybe having some kind of deeper meaning that further discourse can help us arrive at. You may find the movie tired and repetitive for just how much of it lathers on that suspense, but this is an experiment from an indie filmmaker (and I also think the execution makes it a masterpiece). Please support this movie’s theatrical run; I do not really know where else you can see something like this movie except if you vote with your dollar that this kind of tense captivating experience is an aspect to modern horror. Let us know your thoughts on the movie in a comment, and thank you all for reading but curses if you read this far without watching the movie first.

First Impressions On Heart Eyes (2025)

 

By Joe Gibson

 

I am aware that 8 months after release is a little late for some “First Impressions”, but, as it is the Halloween season, I am not exactly sure I want to go through the effort of a more in depth close-read review when I could otherwise watch a lot more horror films this month (and select for review from there). And that’s really it. I don’t want to call this a review for pedantic reasons, but I still want to share my thoughts on the film. 

 

Opening in theaters February 7th of 2025, a movie equal parts romantic comedy and slasher film would have been an ideal date night scenario (for whatever reason, it underperformed with couples and did not exactly break-even), but I did not elect to see it at that time. Actually, looking over the early to mid-2025 film releases, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even go to the theater until July this year. In any case, I was excited to watch Heart Eyes. I liked Mason Gooding from his role in the Scream movies, and, back when I was in the target audience, I enjoyed I Didn’t Do It, a Disney Channel show starring Olivia Holt (the other lead of this film). I liked that show because I was a dumb kid, but for what it is worth, I Didn’t Do It was the closest thing Disney Channel had to complex metatextual storytelling in those days because each episode started in medias res and then filled in the context with semi reliable narrators, ending with a plot twist.

 

The film features Christopher Landon as producer with a writing credit, but Josh Ruben directed the movie. Landon is behind a lot of recent slasher hits and almost directed Scream 7, but Josh Ruben seems to be a lot less accomplished. Still, he also directed Werewolves Within, a film that I have not seen yet but have been wanting to for a little while and will eventually get to. Philip Murphy and Michael Kennedy also possess writing credits on this film, and the latter is a frequent collaborator of Landon’s.

 

Olivia Holt plays the main character of this movie, but the end credits use the same billing trick as the television show Bones, having Mason Gooding, the male love interest, to the right and above her name, with hers at the bottom left. (That way, if you read left to right or up to down, they're both first billing and whatever.) But yeah this is a romantic comedy slasher horror movie relying on meshing the disparate elements and also shared tropes into a cohesive product, a challenge to be sure but not an insurmountable one. It wears this inspiration on its chest when it has the romantic comedy beats positioned in between slasher bits where there is the opening kill and then a meet cute or intimate confession of backstory between the leads and then back to slashing and then seemingly defeating the slasher right into chasing down the lover at the airport. A character even refers to the main relationship in this story as "crazy stupid love, actually” within a monologue listing off the names of other romcoms, so the meta references popularized by Scream remain intact.

 

 

Heart Eyes or The Heart Eyes Killer (HEK) wears some kind of leather mask that reminds me of Jason Voorhees' mask even though that was a hockey mask (I think the resemblance for me comes from the brow crease on HEK’s mask or, looking at it now, maybe just the nose bump). Notably, the mask has red night vision Heart Eyes, hence the name. Heart Eyes hunts lovers on Valentine's Day in a different city every time, employing the use of hunting knives, throwing knives and a crossbow to knock out their intended prey and whoever gets in their way. Consequently, the movie has a high kill count, but the heroes also survive really long against a person who can shoot a crossbow very precisely. (It is not impossible to make it work, but I appreciate the comparative restraint of Scream where Ghostface usually only gets a gun in the third act to raise the stakes or in Scream VI where he gets it for one tense scene and then the third act.) 

There are some genuinely interesting shots (shifting perspective and focus mid action scene or using Heart Eye’s vision gimmick in certain scenes), and the director does a good job at eliciting actor performances to serve the tonal balance of absolute contrived romantic sap and tense slasher storytelling. Notably, compared to his Scream character, Mason Gooding is a lot more vulnerable to taking damage in realistic ways here.

 

I was kind of able to figure out the twist in this movie, and part of this blog post will go over my thought process and the clues or red herrings I noticed on a first pass. However, this was difficult because, as I realized watching this, I understand now at least some of the tropes and shortcuts Scream will use in its mysteries but not for other derivative franchises. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film caught me off guard for not committing to the same type of killer reveal as Scream, and based on the spoilers I have for the film Thanksgiving, it is also possible for these films to just have a solution that does not add up logically (unless the sequels start retconning accomplices like the Saw films). So I did not know going in to err on the side of Scream or IKWYDLS or even Thanksgiving. I will say though, as a hint for any Scream movies if you want to guess them, across all 6 mainline installments, the most surefire method for that is ignoring whatever red herrings the film throws at you and just doing a head count of who is accounted for during every scene.

 

I found it very interesting how, during the opening scene, Heart Eyes killed the couple in a way that inverted the genital symbolism. In art but especially slasher art, penetrative killings are leveraged as phallic imagery, and, as the majority of slasher villains are men but slasher heroes are women, it becomes a way to explore brutal and visceral power dynamics often through knives or machetes or blade hands, all of which penetrate to kill. Heart Eyes uses their blades and arrows to kill the three men in the opening scene. But when the final girl of the opening escapes them by crawling into a wet cylinder, the walls close in on her, crushing her to death. (Incidentally, that cylinder was an industrial wine press.) That is already pretty blatant yonic imagery, but then the red water starts gushing out of vents or holes in the bottom of the machinery, putting a menstrual spin on the death. I have not seen as many slasher films as I would like to, but this seems atypical to me. 

Anyway, when the main detectives stumble upon this crime scene, the dialogue of this murder mystery also frames each of them as suspects but in the reverse way I would expect. The man says “it was probably my incel archetype that did this,” and the woman says “but what if it was a woman like me,” which is really weird because most films would just have them accuse the other person to get this point across efficiently.

 

It is ironic that the film underperformed because one of the romcom elements framing this whole thing is that both of the leads work in marketing for a jewelry company, and Olivia Holt’s character Ally made an advertisement mixing romance with death that bombed and pretty much cost her  job. Life imitating art imitating life, and all that. Through that introduction, the film does weave a compelling story for the heroine with a through line about her fears of intimacy and blood contrasted against her love interest, Mason Gooding’s Jay, who, true to the romcom genre is a bizarre mix of red and green flags because he is clearly analyzing her in every scene and very active in pursuing her (also incidentally a freelancer that was on site for each of Heart Eye’s previous sprees) but also very chivalrous and charismatic.

 

Alright so yeah, in a way that kind of tests your patience in a similar way to IKWYDLS, one of the main cogent suspects for the killer is the love interest (this is Jay, like Ray in IKWYDLS). Jay is not ultimately the killer, and I do not feel bad spoiling that because neither the trailer nor the film felt like pretending he could be. Of the rest of the cast, Ally has a friend named Monica who has a mysterious boyfriend Ally has not met, and Ally’s boss is a Kentucky Fried Tulsi Gabbard looking character with a horde of other employees, and there are five notable characters within a police department as well as Ally’s ex boyfriend and his new girlfriend who have ties to the opening kill victims. 

 

 

Going in, there were a few characters I exonerated for having their motives or introductions revealed too late to be cathartic, and actually I was kind of sort of wrong about one of those (but the strategy overall helped me sift through the red herrings and side characters). The motive is part of the reveal though, so more than that, it was about means and opportunity, and hilariously, though this movie has multiple killers, one of my suspects based on availability still ended up being one of them. (The utility behind having multiple killers is clearing guilty suspects and then prompting fan discussion on which one was in the mask during ambiguous scenes; it is really funny to me that not only could the character that ended up being Heart Eyes have done it alone, but dialogue also tells us exactly who did each scene.)

 

Though the ultimate killer reveal helped some staging inconsistencies (it strains credibility that Heart Eyes could have teleported into Ally’s closet unless there were at least two and one of them had the resources to find out her address quickly), it also creates a contrivance in how a wedding band that has the killer’s initials is important to the investigation into the only other character with those initials (Jay). The killers even reveal that they did not intentionally target Jay from the outset though as turns out to be lucky for them, he was in the same city as each of their previous sprees. Also, pending a rewatch to see if there was better foreshadowing, the film just kind of lies to us about the killers’ motivations until the end, making the motive almost unpredictable. (Obviously, you cannot give away the motive that early one, but the mystery genre is basically just literary Deconstruction in action, and for that to work, there has to be a misspeak in the text that points you to reversing your assumptions about the innocent/guilty binaries in the story, however subtle it is.)

 

I would recommend the movie all in all. Though it is not cleverer or more inspiring than the original Scream, this is a good movie, and it is good in both of the desired genres (which already makes it a better slasher than Scream 3). My main issues with it come from the logistical issues of some plot beats, but those exist in the base genres as well, so making the movie adhere to logic actually risks disrupting those tones. 

 

If I ever actually re-view this movie through an analytical lens, the yonic vs phallic nature of those opening scene deaths would be a good start (in which case I’d probably have to use Freud…who would actually enjoy the part of the movie where one pathetic character calls their lover mommy). I will say though that the film bookends the opening scene in the mid credits scene. In both circumstances, one far off character films two others in a wedding proposal (though I would not call this exactly sequel baiting). Despite some very inventive kills, the gore is rather tame COMPARED to other slasher movies. There is a fair bit of blood shown from minor injuries for realism but also to tie into Ally’s arc. It is rated R and so has the obligatory amount of F bombs. I have no idea if this film will get a sequel, but watch it if you like slashers or romcoms or if you hate both and have a morbidly romantic curiosity.