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.
SICK (2022)
The slasher genre was virtually dead in the 1990s, until Kevin Williamson revitalized it when his screenplay for the first Scream movie. Now Williamson has crafted the script for the new slasher Sick, writing it with Katelyn Crabb – who was credited as his assistant on the fifth Scream movie when it was released last year. (Williamson was an executive producer on that one.) Scream updated slashers for the ‘90s, and with Sick Williamson has delivered another movie that is very much of its time, as is evident from the fact that the movie is referred to as a pandemic slasher.
The story is set at the start of April in 2020, just a few weeks into the lockdown that resulted from the first wave of the Covid pandemic. College students Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million) have decided to shelter in place at Parker’s family’s remote vacation home – and their sheltering is soon crashed by Parker’s sort-of-boyfriend-ish pal DJ (Dylan Sprayberry)... and DJ isn’t the only person who will be showing up at this isolated home on Parker and Miri’s first night there. In the middle of the night, a masked, blade-wielding slasher also shows up... and things get very intense from there. The stalking, slashing, and action sequences Williamson and Crabb wrote are brought to the screen very effectively by director John Hyams, who also did great work on the survival thriller Alone a couple years ago.
It’s very clear that Sick was written by the same person who brought us Scream, and not just in the end when we find out who’s doing the killing and why. It’s also obvious in the portrayal of the slasher throughout the movie, as Parker, Miri, and DJ are all able to knock the slasher around. Just like what happens to Ghostface in the Scream movies. The slasher here isn’t nearly as clumsy and prone to falling down as Ghostface tends to be, but they’re not too slick either. Unfortunately, due to the timing of Sick’s release, I couldn’t keep the recent college student murders in Idaho out of my mind while watching the movie, so whenever the intended victims in the movie were able to strike back against their attacker it seemed more unlikely to me than usual. After all, the killer in Idaho seems to have been able to infiltrate a home in the night and stab four people to death without sustaining much, if any, damage. But that’s why movies like Sick are comforting while also providing thrills and scares. At least in movies we get to see characters fight back against their attackers and defeat them in the end... even if the defeat only lasts until a sequel comes along... Situations in real life don’t often turn out so well.
Sick is highly recommended for any fans of stalk ‘n slash movies. It’s thrilling, it’s entertaining, and features strong performances from the leads. It’s another great addition to the filmographies of both Williamson and Hyams, and a great first writing credit for Crabb.
SMILE (2022)
Writer/director Parker Finn’s feature expansion of / follow-up to his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept, the horror film Smile was originally intended to be released through the Paramount+ streaming service... but then the movie scored so well with the audience at a test screening, the decision was made to give it a theatrical release. And that turned out to be a great move, as Smile went on to earn more than $200 million at the global box office. I didn’t catch up with it until it reached home video, but when I did I could see why it had been so successful. With plenty of scares and an oppressively dark atmosphere, this is exactly the kind of movie that’s great to watch with a group in a large, dark room.
Reminiscent of movies like Ringu / The Ring and It Follows, Smile is a story of “communicable horror”, where a supernatural curse is passed from victim to victim. In this case, some kind of evil force causes people to see visions of creepy, smiling figures who proceed to scare the hell out of them. After tormenting its victims for a while, this evil force then makes the people commit suicide in front of someone else – and then the curse passes on to the person who witnessed the suicide. The lead character is Smile is Doctor Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who works in an emergency psychiatric ward. A patient named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) comes in and kills herself right in front of Rose. Then Rose starts seeing the same sort of visions Laura complained about... and she realizes she is on the same path to death Laura was on. Now she has to figure out how to break the curse.
Finn keeps the scares coming at a steady pace, and the visions cause so much trouble for Rose – it ruins her work days, it crashes her nephew’s birthday party in an awful way – that it’s easy to side with this beleaguered character and root for her to find a way out of this situation. Especially since Bacon delivers a strong performance throughout. We side with her even more when her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) turns out to be completely worthless. Thankfully, Rose’s ex Joel is a good guy and a police officer who proves to be much more helpful than Trevor was. Another point in Joel’s favor is the fact that he’s played by Kyle Gallner, who has become one of my favorite actors through his work in genre movies like Red State, Jennifer’s Body, Scream (2022), etc.
Smile is a little long at 115 minutes, but I had a good time watching it and look forward to seeing what Parker Finn is going to do next.
No comments:
Post a Comment