Happy Death Day (2017)
I'm pretty sure everyone who watched the trailer for this movie got the gist of the plot: it's Groundhog Day, but with murder. Of course, our lead - played by the film's absolute standout actor, Jessica Rothe - has never seen Groundhog Day and has apparently never heard of it, because it takes her an absurdly long time to try to be a better person. Instead, she spends a long time trying to solve her own murder by a weird person in a creepy baby mask. So her own murder happens again and again and again.
Happy Death Day definitely has flashes of greatness. As a murder mystery, it is far more effective than as a horror movie. You really want to know whodunnit. They really do set up everyone as a suspect, and they do so in a way that actually kept me guessing. I kept reading real answers as red herrings and misleads as the real deal. The final resolve ended up being quite disappointing, but I think that's because as a movie lover, I kept wanting the killer to be bigger and better and wanting more. Like, imagine if it went all Nacho Vigalondo on us, and the killer was Rothe's character from another timeline herself? My friend and I spent most of our dinner devising new and improved twists. Still, with all of the action, the movie maintains excellent pacing and keeps you on your toes. The performances are also decent, for the most part. I mentioned Rothe, and she is the highlight of the movie, but everyone seems to be keen to ham it up.
Unfortunately, as a consequence of being released in 2017, it's hard not to catch the parts of this movie that feel a bit tired. It's a weird cocktail of American college movies (the worst thereof), slasher flicks and time loop movies. I'm glad it has its tongue placed firmly in cheek, but it's hard not to spend the first half of the movie rolling your eyes at the over-abundance of sorority girl caricatures and exaggerated mean girl antics. It's 2017, guys. We've all seen Legally Blonde. I thought we'd stopped painting sororities with such broad stokes. Some of the jokes land, but plenty of them feel stale, and some of them feel in poor taste. To have a character being revealed as gay to be a punchline - again, guys, it's 2017. That was never funny and it should be obvious to screenwriters by now that it isn't going to fly. It also suffered from the modern horror pandemic of overreliance on jump scares, which is presumably to counteract the lack of gore, but doesn't do so in a particularly inventive way. I spent most of the movie picking the spots we'd find the jump scares in.
I sound harsh. This is a pretty standard October horror release, made for obviously commercial purposes, and it has a better sense of humor than a lot of them. It builds and builds to a series of reveals that work really well. Characters might be essentially cardboard cutouts, but they come together in satisfying ways as the movie unwinds. There were a lot of things about this movie that bugged me - notably, the misuse and invisibility of non-white characters; the reveal of a characters homosexuality as a big ol' joke; Israel Broussard's weird shaved sideburns; the occasional lapse of the movie into an old fashioned slapstick fest - but overall I had a good time with it. There are parts of this movie that do make it well worth the watch, some really fun sequences, but there's nothing that will make this stand out amongst some of the awesome horror we've had this year (Raw, Get Out).
Rating: 6.5/10 - It's good and it's fun but it's incredibly derivative. Good fun for spooky season, but not one I'll seek out beyond that.
Happy Death Day definitely has flashes of greatness. As a murder mystery, it is far more effective than as a horror movie. You really want to know whodunnit. They really do set up everyone as a suspect, and they do so in a way that actually kept me guessing. I kept reading real answers as red herrings and misleads as the real deal. The final resolve ended up being quite disappointing, but I think that's because as a movie lover, I kept wanting the killer to be bigger and better and wanting more. Like, imagine if it went all Nacho Vigalondo on us, and the killer was Rothe's character from another timeline herself? My friend and I spent most of our dinner devising new and improved twists. Still, with all of the action, the movie maintains excellent pacing and keeps you on your toes. The performances are also decent, for the most part. I mentioned Rothe, and she is the highlight of the movie, but everyone seems to be keen to ham it up.
Unfortunately, as a consequence of being released in 2017, it's hard not to catch the parts of this movie that feel a bit tired. It's a weird cocktail of American college movies (the worst thereof), slasher flicks and time loop movies. I'm glad it has its tongue placed firmly in cheek, but it's hard not to spend the first half of the movie rolling your eyes at the over-abundance of sorority girl caricatures and exaggerated mean girl antics. It's 2017, guys. We've all seen Legally Blonde. I thought we'd stopped painting sororities with such broad stokes. Some of the jokes land, but plenty of them feel stale, and some of them feel in poor taste. To have a character being revealed as gay to be a punchline - again, guys, it's 2017. That was never funny and it should be obvious to screenwriters by now that it isn't going to fly. It also suffered from the modern horror pandemic of overreliance on jump scares, which is presumably to counteract the lack of gore, but doesn't do so in a particularly inventive way. I spent most of the movie picking the spots we'd find the jump scares in.
I sound harsh. This is a pretty standard October horror release, made for obviously commercial purposes, and it has a better sense of humor than a lot of them. It builds and builds to a series of reveals that work really well. Characters might be essentially cardboard cutouts, but they come together in satisfying ways as the movie unwinds. There were a lot of things about this movie that bugged me - notably, the misuse and invisibility of non-white characters; the reveal of a characters homosexuality as a big ol' joke; Israel Broussard's weird shaved sideburns; the occasional lapse of the movie into an old fashioned slapstick fest - but overall I had a good time with it. There are parts of this movie that do make it well worth the watch, some really fun sequences, but there's nothing that will make this stand out amongst some of the awesome horror we've had this year (Raw, Get Out).
Rating: 6.5/10 - It's good and it's fun but it's incredibly derivative. Good fun for spooky season, but not one I'll seek out beyond that.
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