This movie’s title is going to turn off a lot of people and leave some questions to be answered later on my initial fumblings to get a good photo of the film poster. I watched this movie optimistically hoping that it would be a kitschy C-list movie for people who loved homages to cult horror films, because the trailer held such promise–we’re in a movie theater! it’s a Christian-owned and operated theater! there’s blood! and teens discovering romance! a demon succubus of some sort! Unfortunately, that is as far as the filmmakers got as well.
I’m writing this review almost exactly a month since I saw the movie (has it only/already been a month?) and catching up on other reviews as well. You should expect to see a bunch of little articles popping up–and one big one, I’m 6000 words into a review of Last Days of American Crime right now and counting. I assume the reason why it’s taken me this long to write about this movie is the sting of it’s betrayal is still fresh like a knife wound to the back.
In lieu of spending any time throwing back to actual creepy cult movies of the 70s, the film devotes a whole lot of time to a made up movie, which doesn’t have the same level of impact. The discovered movie has no cultural cache, nor does it help to watch it two or three times as the kids are lured into making poorer and poorer decisions on their night of horrors. There’s–by design–not a lot of chemistry between our five heroes: the closeted gay character sent away to conversion camp has the most compelling back story, but it’s not actually played to any effect; the girl who’s helplessly attracted to him and wears (gasp) eyeliner; the two pervy friends; and the metal burnout who spends a majority of his time raining on everyone else’s parade.
There isn’t a whole lot of physical comedy in this Scooby Doo caper. At one point, wife looked up from her e-reader and said, I like how they’re using practical effects in this scene where the succubus comes through a wall to grab at the kids, and I thought I might be able to write a little about that in a sort of compliment sandwich type way, but it didn’t take long for the bad CGI to come in the summoning scene and sort of ruin even that semblance of a redeeming quality. The strip tease in that scene might be the kernel of genius that gave this film it’s green light, but it is not enough to recommend anything more than a few passing scenes. There’s also a weird ableist subplot where one of the kids has a physical disability that is corrected when he becomes a demon, and I don’t really know what the fuck to do with that except tell you to not waste your time here.
The time will come when a movie will do this exact thing a lot better, but now is not that time.
