We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody watches a Thanksgiving horror movie and a Christmas horror movie.
KRISTY (2014)
There aren’t enough good horror movies set around the Thanksgiving holiday. So it’s a shame that Eli Roth has never expanded his Grindhouse faux trailer for a slasher movie called Thanksgiving into a feature film. A few years ago, the 1987 slasher Blood Rage finally started getting the recognition it deserves as a Thanksgiving horror classic. And this year I got around to watching a movie I had been intending to watch for years, director Oliver Blackburn’s Kristy. When I had my seven-years-or-so-late viewing of Kristy, I discovered that it is also a great Thanksgiving horror movie.
Kristy started as a spec script written by Anthony Jaswinski, who also scripted the very cool “surfer trapped by a shark” movie The Shallows. With this one, he tells the story of college student Justine (Haley Bennett), who is on financial aid and therefore can’t afford to go home over the Thanksgiving break. She ends up being the only student stuck at the school, accompanied by a couple guards and the pothead groundskeeper. You might think it’s a lucky break that her friend left behind a BMW for her to drive if she ever needs to go get something... But having that BMW in her possession is not lucky at all. After spending a day bouncing around the empty school, dancing in halls, using the swimming pool, hitting balls down the corridors, she decides to drive over to the nearest gas station / convenience store to get some ice cream. And there she’s spotted by a quartet of total weirdos.
The story informs us that there’s a gathering of people online who hate girls they call Kristys. Privileged, pretty girls who have been blessed in life. They target Kristys, murder them on camera, and share the snuff videos on the dark web. These four weirdos Justine bumps into – three men with their faces obscured and the sickly looking Violet (Ashley Greene) – are part of this Kristy-hating online culture. And when they see Justine driving a BMW, they decide to make her the target for a snuff video. Justine crosses paths with these creeps with about an hour of the movie’s 85 minute running time left, and that remaining hour gets quite intense.
Violet and her associates follow Justine to the empty college and proceed to make her night a living hell, pursuing her through the halls and around the grounds, killing anyone else who gets in between them and their prey. As this situation played out, it really reminded me of The Strangers (with, as blog contributor Priscilla pointed out, some touches of P2). If the script had ended up in different hands, it easily could have been rewritten into a Stranger sequel. Call it The Strangers Go to College. That was never on the cards, but there was a time when Kristy was going to be a Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead reunion. Gary Fleder was going to direct the film, with Scott Rosenberg reworking the script. While it would have been interesting to see how Fleder would have shot it, Kristy turned out very well with Blackburn at the helm.
If you are, like me, a movie fan who likes to celebrate holidays by watching movies that have something to do with the date, I recommend adding Kristy to your viewing rotation. If it isn’t already in there. As I said, I was late to the party on this one. But I will definitely be watching Kristy in future Novembers. Produced by Child's Play franchise producer David Kirschner and executive produced by Sinister / Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson, this is a horror movie that deserves more attention.
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