Hush (2016)

Let's talk about Mike Flanagan. He's one of horror's best new directors – probably THE best in my estimation, even if only for the film Absentia, which is still one of my favorites of any era of horror. He followed it up a few years later with Oculus, which was also good if not as good, perhaps a bit less layered and character-driven, but still one-upping most contemporaries at the supernatural horror genre. Now he's come out with the Netflix exclusive Hush, which, if nothing else, does show us here at Cinema Freaks that the best way to survive a home invasion is to be deaf.

There are also SPOILERS in this review, so tread with caution!

Director: Mike Flanagan

Starring: Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr.

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Up front: We both think this is a really cool movie. It's very inventive and has a lot of cool, subtle touches that raise it above the average thriller in this genre. I'm not even very big on the home invasion stuff – I think a lot of it is pretty trite trash. But this one is good.

So, then. Let's talk about why.

The film starts off pretty quaintly – a deaf woman, Maddie, is cooking dinner and still sort of conflicted over her old boyfriend, which is a plot never quite elaborated on and I'm glad the film didn't spend much time on it. She gets a visit from her friend, who talks to Maddie about her book, which the friend apparently loved. Maddie says she gets the ideas for her stories from a voice in her head, which, while interesting, could also have much in common with schizophrenia.

Not to imply that writers would ever be anything less than sane.

It does set up the main undertone of the story, though, which is Maddie's talent for seeing all sorts of different endings. She has seven for her book on her computer, as we see later – and she's frustrated because none of them are working out right. Her friend leaves after a mishap with the food she's cooking. Little did she know Maddie wanted everything to be burnt to a crisp – it's that special kind of cuisine.

Later on we get some more shading and backstory – apparently Maddie moved out to the country to be alone. Her sister and family think it would be better if she moved back into the city, but she doesn't want to. And this guy who she used to date, I guess, keeps calling her incessantly after she starts to call him and then stops. Stop creeping on her, asshole! And, while this is all going on, a guy has broken into her home and has killed her best friend outside!

I wonder if the killer doesn't know she's deaf. Maybe he's thinking "wow, this girl must really hate her best friend to not even LOOK over here when I am killing her." I wonder if that makes him mad, like a spoiled kid whose parents won't even pay him mind. I hope it does.

Oh, wait. That isn't backstory. It's actually just the regular, real and very tense plot.

I do like how the killer just pops up with no warning. Like a fucking Jack in the Box. That's badass. He comes like a force of nature and there's zero explanation for his appearance. He doesn't get some sort of secret connection, some soap-opera shit where you find out he's Maddie's long lost cousin who she once killed his pet hamster, or something like that. No, this guy is just some random psycho, stalking the house with a crossbow.

Maddie finally realizes something is wrong and tries to escape in vain. This starts the meat of the movie – the long, darkly-lit cat-and-mouse thrill sequence where Maddie tries to survive the torments of the man outside, who proves to be very sadistic. I mean, I know that's a hell of an accusation. But look at this – he uses her dead friend as this sick puppet and knocks her hand on the window. Over and over, he does this. I'm not one to judge by first appearances. But I think this guy is probably a fucking whack job.

Hey, we all have issues and we all deal with them in different ways.

Fortunately, Maddie is no slouch herself. She maneuvers all kinds of shit during this movie. She's able to stay alive with gusto, even. Like a female, deaf John McClain, which is really what I think John McClain was all the time inside. A deaf woman. That's what every action hero is inside – a kick ass deaf woman.

The film goes along quite swimmingly, with not a whole lot to pick apart or criticize – it's just a very solid, tense home invasion flick, and the scenes are well constructed and engaging. The film is good because it doesn't insult your intelligence. There are no dumb scenes of Maddie trying to talk and reason with the killer – well, for obvious reasons, actually. And there's no implausible torture-traps or twists of fate where it makes the killer look to have superpowers, a la The Collector. It just gives you good, lean, mean suspense and thrills. Which really should not be some sort of revolutionary thing – but there you go; that's the state of this genre.

One scene I liked that also bucked cliché was when that dead girl's boyfriend shows up later on and distracts the killer. The killer does pretend he's a cop, which is a bit silly. But it never goes the way I expected it to – they do NOT have the killer immediately overpower the guy, tricking him like he's some sort of omnipotent force. The guy almost gets the drop on the killer, actually. The only reason he doesn't is because Maddie distracts him from far away, not being able to tell that he had the upper hand. That's a really cruel fucking twist of fate, and works macabrely in the movie's favor. The killer does kill the guy and it's much closer than it is in other films.

Another great scene: Maddie makes a break for it running outside. The killer catches her immediately with a rock to the head, then straddles her and smashes her head in with another rock.

Cut to her back in the house, having imagined the whole thing. It's her “writer brain” from earlier kicking in – she's a better strategist than most main characters, it appears, being able to judge bad ideas before actually trying to do them.

Instead, what ends up happening is a more closed-in fight scene inside the house, in which she blinds him with bug spray to the eyes and then deafens him with her super loud fire alarm device. Then she ends up stabbing him with a wine opener that appeared earlier in the movie. The old Chekhov's Wine Opener plot device. I know it well...

This is just a solid as fuck horror film. I think this is well done for its tense atmosphere, its clearly defined and exciting series of events and the main character, Maddie, who is very capable, badass and interesting to watch, not to mention actually likable and sympathetic – not always a given with horror movies.

But there are also a few other subtle things I really like about this. For one, the use of sound – the movie's name, Hush, isn't an accident. The film does well to point out and play around with Maddie's deafness as a sort of aesthetic device. The moments in the film where she's alone and then a sound appears to the viewer, piercing the silence in that way that we know she can't hear, are interesting and different, and they're very small, mostly cropping up in the beginning before all the action starts – but it's little, subtle touches like this, very well woven into the film, that establish her character, set the tone for the film and add a detail that the film would've been a bit worse without.

And I like that she's deaf – that she can survive while being a deaf woman trapped in this situation. Those little moments I mentioned? Those are kind of like the butterfly flapping its wings before a storm happens – Butterfly Effect type shit. She figures out new, inventive ways to escape the killer and holds her own, and thus, her deafness is actually what sets this whole movie apart from its parent 'home invasion' genre. It's very fresh in that way.

I also enjoyed the minor theme running through of Maddie's writing career. The 'writer brain' concept is very cool, and developed subtly but well over the film's course. She starts out the film unable to finish her book, leaving a computer full of half-finished notes and a lot of frustration as her attacker then traps her in the house, cuts off the power and kills everyone she knows. But she's able to survive the ordeal, at least in part, because she's adapted so well to being deaf. Kind of a “other senses amplified” sort of deal. But she actually survives because of what she can do that others can't – her disability forces her to be more crafty than someone who could hear might be, but it's her writing talent and creative mind that helps her actually come out on top.

That's pretty fucking cool. Go see Hush. It's on Netflix so you have no excuse if you've got that. Otherwise, I guess you have plenty of excuses.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.

You're Next (2013)

As the holidays is a time for sitting around a table with people you're not sure you like, I figured I'd take a crack at one of the movies that shows exactly what it's like to sit at a table with people you hate and then die from an arrow to the throat. You know, like you do. This is You're Next.

Director: Adam Wingard

Starring: Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci

IMDb

Co-written with Colin.

This is apparently a part of a new subgenre called “mumblegore,” which I can only imagine is referring to the endless mumbling every single character has in place of real dialogue. As You're Next doesn't have much mumbling and instead just has regular, shitty dialogue, I have to say this is a bad example of mumblegore. Then again I might have the wrong definition of what mumblegore is. But I'm always right, so I doubt that.

I rated this movie the worst of 2013 back on my list for that year. It was nearly unwatchable when I didn't know what to expect. But now that I know to set my expectations lower than the water level of Florida for this, I don't have the same frothing hatred for it. Plus I teamed up with Cinema Freaks alum and sometimes-contributor The Observer for this, like old times, so it was a little better that way.

The movie begins with a scene of characters we don't know fucking. As an added bonus of worthlessness, they aren't the main characters, and we don't know their names and never see them again. But the opening does provide us with one of the staples of any erotic porno: the erotic orange juice pouring scene!

Scandalous.

Anyway, they're killed off, and we then move on to our main annoyances – a bunch of people meeting up at this big house for their parents' anniversary dinner. The mother and father get there first and things are already weird. Like all good horror movies, there's a pointless and dragged out scene where the father searches upstairs for the source of a mysterious noise that scared the mother, only to find out it was his weenie of a son Crispian rummaging around up there.

"Hey Dad, I know how much you liked being jump scared, so of course I had to do it this way!"

Red herring, awesome! How did Crispian get up there without them seeing him come in downstairs? Did he scale up the wall like Spider-Man? Was there a secret passage in this house? I mean, it does kind of look like the house from the Clue board games.

The main character is Erin, an Australian girl who's dating Crispian. They lay around later and spew soulless exposition to lay out the very easy story – their parents are having an anniversary and all Crispian's siblings are coming the next day. That's really the only reason to film this scene, to info-dump that on us. Uh, great job? I think you should go back to just mumbling everything, movie.

The family gets there, and it's basically all downhill from there. They argue over silly things like how unprofessional it is for Crispian, a teacher, to date Erin, who used to be one of his students. His brother is a real dick about it and they erupt into a full scale battle over it immediately, ruining their parents' anniversary like champs!

Fortunately, the parents were used to their children being insufferable morons.

As that apparently was enough character development to last an entire film, we're just done with all that shit now, and it's time for people to start dying. A bunch of unknown killers start shooting arrows into the house, which is frankly a blessing in disguise for these miserable people. They kill a few people, and the survivors huddle together and attempt to plan a way out. One of the girls volunteers, saying she's a very fast runner, but then she runs in stupid slow-mo cam and gets hit by barbed wire in the neck the second she opens the doors!

That isn't a camera trick - she just runs really slow and lies about being fast.

So it was a terrible idea, but at least that scene was pretty funny. So there was that. There's another killer waiting under the bed, who stabs the mom. He was apparently there for quite some time, and he still can't kill the rest of them. I guess it's just more conveniently dramatic that he did it this way. Of course no one else finds him and there's nothing that comes of this aside from the mom's death. What, did you want something actually interesting to happen? Pfft.

But to be fair, we DID need a hokey title drop scene!

The next thirty-odd minutes is just them scampering around in the house and sometimes dying. The fact that the characters wear animal masks really is pretty dumb. Somehow, Jason Voorhees always came off as somewhat menacing, but these guys are just clowns. There's no mystique, even before you get to the twist later. It just looks like the killers were lazy and had no imagination, so they grabbed the worst, cheapest masks at Party City.

It's revealed somewhere in the middle of all this that the main girl Erin was actually a child of a survivalist who learned how to fight and survive attacks just like this as a child. It's kind of glossed over, but the idea of a kid growing up in that environment is actually pretty cool. I certainly would have liked to see that instead of the movie we ended up getting!

Seriously, though, it's really just shoehorned in there because they needed SOMEONE to fight back, or else we'd have no movie! It's like “hey, we can't just have them kill everyone off, the movie will be over in ten minutes.” “Okay, whatever, throw in a survivalist character. Make her a hot chick, too.” Movie saved!

The best part (read: worst part) of this is that she didn't tell her boyfriend Crispian yet, for no reason other than that it would conflict with the plot twist of him being a killer later, and if he'd known she was a badass fighter, he never would have brought her, and we wouldn't have a fucking movie. Good writing! High five!

Then it's revealed, I guess, that the whole thing has been a plot by some of the family members to get their parents' inheritance money. You know how it goes, sometimes you're down on cash, and you need to stage an all-night-long murder fest in which everyone gets shot by arrows. Fucking please. There was no other way to enact this plan? You HAD to put on dumb animal masks and shoot everyone with arrows one by one? I guess poisoning their food or just hiring a guy to walk in with a gun would have been too much. But really they just didn't do those things because then there would have been no movie.

There's just no humanity to these characters, and no reason for them to act the way they do. I'm not saying we need a long exploration of their motivations, but what do we get instead of any development? A scene of the brother's goth girlfriend asking him to fuck her next to his mom's dead body on the bed? Yeah, I can see what they were going for now. I take it all back.

The rest of the movie doesn't even really try. It's full of dumpster-bin cliché like the henchmen thugs working themselves into a self-righteous lather when one of their own gets killed. HOW DARE YOU FIGHT BACK WHEN WE'RE TRYING TO KILL YOU!!! Maybe your job security isn't that good on this job after all!

The chase scenes are pretty goofy, too. One highlight for us was the guy who tries to step through a window. He sees the one row of nails on a wooden board, goes 'okay, I can do it,' and then steps down without even looking and impales his own foot on another nail. He then starts galumphing around and probably making it worse, because what horror movie has NOT been helped by comparisons to a Looney Tunes cartoon?

Just add the Roadrunner giving the audience a wink and it'll be gold.

Then there's the scene where Erin kills a guy with a blender, which totally is something she was taught in survivalist camp, I'm sure. That's just basic 101 stuff.

Oh, and the height of ridiculousness has to be when it's revealed that Crispian was a part of the whole thing, as the movie had kept him out of action for the last 40 minutes and made you wonder. He gives a very stupid, shitty speech in the most callous way possible about how he just wanted money so they could go on vacation, and c'maaaaaaaaahhhnnn, babe, don't you see why this was a good idea?! He really sounds like he's talking about not tipping a server at a restaurant, when he's actually saying he hired some guys to kill most of his family for money. It's just about the dumbest thing I've seen in the movie yet, which is no small feat.

"Hey, I'm a real catch, I killed my family so we could get some extra pocket money. On second thought, saying it out loud, maybe this was a bad idea. Man am I dead inside!"

So she kills Crispian, and then the cops come in and shoot Erin too, because I guess they hated having clean work performance records and wanted to be total fuck-ups. This scene was kinda like Night of the Living Dead, though! In...pretty much the only weird comparison to that classic flick that You're Next will ever draw.

This is a piss poor movie with nothing to recommend, frankly. Bad characters, no good scares, no atmosphere, and oh yeah, a tired home invasion plot with a weak twist at the end. There's really no exploration of the theme they seemed to be going for, this whole idea of a Great Gatsby-esque profane wealth, and what wealth does to people, makes them crazy and moral-less, et cetera. That seemed like the basic idea they wanted to get across. But instead, it was just a shitty home invasion movie, and you never really gleaned any point.

It's basically complete shit. Shame, because it seemed like it could have been good, based on the people involved, but I guess you can't win 'em all. Anyway, at least your holiday family dinners won't be as bad in comparison.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.