I really wondered what I thought I was doing bothering to see this movie. When you enter the theatre and there are only 2 other people there and it’s an 11 show, it does make you start to rethink your choices. Let’s not kid, after watching The 100, seeing Alyicia Debnam Carey in anything is almost a must, though I do avoid Fear the Walking Dead because I just can’t do any more zombies. Lexa did deserve better, and so did we. Anyway. This movie is about a girl who is super popular, and pretty, and white, because of course (more on complete lack of diversity later, though there were fat people, so a quarter of a point back). Possible SPOILERS AHEAD. So, super popular pretty girl takes pity on unattractive crazy girl and then crazy girl stalks pretty girl and then commits suicide (crazy girl). Wackiness ensues.
I could talk about the substance of the movie, but there’s not much to say. There was some implication that the crazy girl was disturbed from an early age and turned to the dark arts, how that factors into her hacking everyone’s Facebook accounts wasn’t totally clear. I always love how these sorts of movies show these people being so utterly deranged they can’t handle any sort of rejection. That seems sort of crazy. If you deal with a lot of rejection, yes, it doesn’t get easier, but people don’t usually lose their minds. Of course, the movie tries to tie in some sort of lore about the horror paying itself forward, but that’s not really interesting, is it? The movie wasn’t all that interesting either, sorry, ADC.
With respect to my Hina test (to test diversity, strong female characters) – this movie gets a hard fail, like a flaming, unforgivable pile of fail. The main character, Lauren Woodson (a Lexa reference maybe? All the fan fictions give her the last name of Woods), has to have men come save her at every turn and everyone is white. There’s the ex-guy who is still into her and then she’s dating Peter from the Chronicles of Narnia. I didn’t recognize him until I saw the cast page. Wow, Peter is all grown up and looking good. So, I think this could create a whole new sub-genre of fan fiction – Peter and Lexa with Clarke, of course, because Lexa is with Clarke. I know, this review is as focused as the movie was yesterday.
Horror movies are supposed to be kind of scary, kind of teaching something, but this movie really didn’t teach me anything, though I may have smuggled Starbucks and yogurt in, so that was a first and while I may have covered my eyes, I wasn’t really scared. The acting was decent. AIycia Debnam Carey was wonderful as ever, but this wasn’t a strong story and the cast was not as strong as she was. I thought Will Moseley (Peter from Narnia) was actually decent, but that’s about the extent. I did think the creepy girl was creepy, but that could be attributed to makeup and lighting. I did like that there were actors of all types, a chubby girl and her chubby boyfriend get killed first, because of course. There were no non-white people in the movie pretty much.
When it comes to horror, the genre was reinvented, in print form, by Stephen King. It felt like a rite of passage for most of us growing up to have read at least some, if not most of his books. King had a way of spinning stories that were grotesque but also had elements of sexual tension that made anyone uncomfortable. That was one thing I never understood the need to incorporate. In many, if not most, horror movies, there is always some allusion to a hero/heroine losing their virginity and this making them able or unable to defeat whatever is coming. In the movie It Follows, this was a central premise of the movie (almost a literal, physical STD).
If you’re not familiar with the story of It, in a tiny town in Maine (where King grew up), a little boy goes missing, as well as others, and after the school year, the big brother of the missing kid and his friends try to find some clue as to the brother’s whereabouts. The book had a long drawn out depiction of the bullies in the town making everyone’s lives intolerably harder, but the movie shows the kids all banding together against the bullies, and even one of them going missing, though no one seems all that concerned. The kids are all haunted by any number of things, none looking exactly the same, all of them terrifying and unseen by others. There is always a clown somewhere in the mix. That is Pennywise, whose origin is unknown. The chubby kid (whose name I’ve forgotten) does research in the library and discovers that every 27 years, kids start disappearing. Somehow the kids conclude that whatever is doing this disappearing appears once every 27 years and eats kids and they have to kill it.
Amongst all the gore and mayhem is a nice coming of age story, one that surprisingly doesn’t end in more death. There may be some SPOILERS ahead. The book spent a lot of time talking about a lot of issues. The book is also a thousand pages long. I can’t imagine being an editor for Stephen King, or if he even uses one. I really tried to remember the book as I watched the movie, and only a couple scenes stood out, the scary ones. I don’t even remember some of the tenser sequences. I stumbled upon an article today that talked about a sex scene that I don’t even remember from the book (with all the kids, glad that didn’t make the cut!). While I’m sure King had a reason for putting such things in there, it was grotesque. I also wondered, at the very end of the movie, when the kids swear a blood pact, how they don’t all contract Hep C or something. I mean, they also ran around a sewer and crack house and didn’t get seriously ill, seems surprising.
I wouldn’t say this was a good movie. I wouldn’t say it was a bad movie. It felt like it just was. This rush for 1980s content is both fascinating and frustrating. I grew up in the 1980s. It is just plain weird to see these kinds of movies being considered as period pieces, but they are. Overall, this movie captured the King mythos of It well. It took me back to that time, the time when talking to strangers was something explicitly warned about. Not now, where it is assumed that people you don’t know can’t be trusted. It did bother me that there was exactly one minority character and one girl (this fails the Hina test), and that is accurate for the 1980s. It was the same complaint I had while watching Stranger Things. Why is diversity such an issue? Just because the times have changed doesn’t mean those people didn’t exist.
Much like It, this review rambled about as much as Stephen King did. I still can’t believe my parents let me read that book.
