Director: Josh Ruben
Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I’ll admit that it somehow missed my radar altogether, but a last-minute re-working of the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule brought me here.
Did I Like It: I can’t readily recall the last time I’ve been on such a roller coaster with a movie. For the first stretch it feels like it is going to be a fun gore-fest, somewhere in the vein of the Evil Dead series (and likely competing with The Monkey (2025) for screens and audiences). It also wants to weave romantic comedy tropes into the trappings of a horror movie. It worked for Shaun of the Dead (2004), why can’t it work here*?
Then it settles into the comfortable slasher rhythm that has become ubiquitous in the wave of Scream (1996) and its more recent sequels. I’m sitting there not being terribly frightened (I might be past the time where a slasher elicits any kind of real fear) and I’m more concerned with trying to figure out who did it.
I’m kind of tired watching a horror movie and slowly realizing I’m watching less of a horror movie and actually watching what amounts to a cozy mystery**.
But then something happens in the third act that gave me a strange sense of hope. The mystery suddenly becomes incidental to the murder and mayhem. For a moment, I almost dared hope that the pure simplicity of John Carpenter might be heading for its renaissance.
Then the film goes on for another twenty minutes and veers right into being just another Scream clone. Disappointment abounds.
*Spoiler alert for the end of the review: The reason it won’t work is because few people are Edgar Wright. Shaun works because the horror works, and the romantic comedy works. This movie ends up being a mashup of the later Scream-quels and something like Crazy Stupid Love (2011), when I’d really love to see a mashup of You’ve Got Mail (1998) and Halloween (1978). But I get why film studios hesitate to make films they can only market to me.
**There are few terms in the world that set my teeth on edge more than “cozy mystery.” I have my reasons.