Tag: psychos

October Challenge – Day 7

Tonight’s movie is Canadian Horror Comedy “Vicious Fun”. A movie about killing serial killers set in the 80’s because… why not, I guess. The film stars Evan Marsh, Amber Goldfarb and Ari Millen, is directed by Cody Calahan and written by Calahan and James Villeneuve.

Synopsis

Our story follows Joel (Marsh), a loser film critic for a Horror magazine that manages to stumble into a gathering of America’s most successful psychopaths. At first he attempts to blend in, but his rouse only lasts until the arrival of Bob, another psycho that also happens to be dating his roommate and specialises in faking occupations, so is quick to rumble Joel. Then it becomes a struggle for survival, but fortunately for him one of the psycho’s isn’t all she seems.

Admittedly that seems a bit of a spoiler, but they unfortunately telegraphed it a bit too much in the opening scene where we see a woman (Goldfarb) hitch a lift in the car of someone that is obviously a serial killer and then kill him. That wasn’t a great start. Not only is it a bit cliché (I’ve seen the victim turns out to be the killer many times since I first came across it in Blade II in 2002 when it was still a subversion), it also gave away that she wasn’t a legit member of the psycho fun club and diminished the surprise of Joel realising the situation he is in (Would have been so much better if it come out of nowhere).

Psycho Buddies

Joel and his saviour, Carrie, find themselves having to deal with the other killers and a bunch of horrendously incompetent cops to boot. The psychos themselves are a colourful bunch of of somewhat stereotypical loonies, including a classic hulking slasher type (Robert Maillet), a John Wayne Gacy type (Julian Richings), an Yakuza assassin type (Sean Baek), an ex-CIA torture specialist (David Koechner) and of course Bob (Millen), whose ability to disguise himself isn’t actually that impressive and relies on everyone being an idiot. Fortunately this is very much a comedy horror and very much a self aware one with Joel even pointing out how bad Bob’s disguise was. Bob is clearly modelled on Patrick Bateman from American Psycho but really just comes across as your typical 80’s movie douchebag (The kind of person that is inexplicably dating the hot girl and challenges the hero to a skiing competition).

For the comedy side of things the best part is the interaction between the serial killers. That was actually quite fun, while Joel’s general pathetic incompetence was too clichéd to enjoy. Eventually Joel has to pull himself together and grow a pair with the guidance of bad ass Carrie. But this is something I’ve seen done before and much better in “Guns Akimbo”. Not only did that feature two better actors in Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving, but the balance was a lot better with Radcliffe actually becoming quite badass by the end and Weaving not feeling like an unstoppable ass kicking machine with impenetrable plot armour. It is frankly a much better film.

Assessment (some spoilers)

The way most of the killers are despatched is a little too easy for my liking, with Bob really being the only threat for Carrie, but only through luck and then even a weakened Carrie, after losing a load of blood makes short work of him. Honestly Carrie is way OP in this. Not only that but when Joel’s room mate turns up, she randomly pulls out some martial arts and takes out the John Wayne Gacy type killer. You can tell this movie came out recently. It also seems to have made the mistake of assuming it would get a sequel seeing as the movie has a big set up with no pay off (Specifically a big bad that is talked about but never shows up).

The violence is pretty well done, but the real strength of this movie is the initial premise and the synopsis I read seemed to suggest Joel pretending to a be a serial killer would go on for a lot more of the film and it’s a shame it didn’t because that was the best part I would have liked more of that and more of the killers in general. Everyone other than Bob who was just a douche. A lot more interesting things could have been done with this premise but they missed that opportunity by basically turning it into a less interesting version of Guns Akimbo. It’s also worth noting the serial killer convention idea was done in The Sandman comics back in the 90’s so the most interesting part of the film is also not original.

Stranger Nostalgia

The soundtrack is 80’s style Synthwave, reminiscent of Stranger Things. Again at this point that’s become somewhat of a cliché thanks to Stranger Things, but I’m not complaining because I like Synthwave. That brings me to the fact the movie is set in the 80’s. It’s clear they wanted to go for some kind of 80’s style but the truth is this movie could have been set any time before mobile phones were common and not change one bit. Also because it’s heroes are very much from the archetype of 2010’s/2020’s heroes and not the 1980’s ones it means that theme simply fails to click. Indeed it was only the end credit soundtrack that reminded me it was an 80’s movie.

The film seems to want to be retro while not really committing firmly enough to that to pull it off. Meanwhile the imaginative premise is blown far too early and the movie ends up going exactly as expected it to after that opening scene. The performances are all competent enough (Especially Julian Richings, David Koechner and surprisingly Robert Maillet who used to Wrestle under the name “Kurgen” in the 90’s) and the production values are solid. So it’s not actually a bad film as such, just very average.

Final Judgement

As such I’m going to give this a 5/10. Too many conflicting ideas and too many modern cliché’s waste the films few good ideas and push the interesting characters into the background. A movie that wants to cash in on 80’s nostalgia but doesn’t really show any affection for the decade itself.