Needle (2010)

Needle is an Australian horror movie inexplicably set in America, wherein half of the characters have terrible fake American accents and the other half are just explained away as Australian expats or exchange students. It’s fine, guys. You can actually set a movie in Australia. It’s really important that it’s set in America, for some reason. 

I mean, it’s probably more important that I tell you what this movie’s plot is: fake-American college boy inherits a wacky mysterious machine from his father, which ends up getting stolen and is subsequently used to torture everyone he cares about. Say, a slasher film if Michael Myers was never actually there and just killed everyone with voodoo dolls. 

Nothing new or unique, but it does offer up some cool potential - the second kill (or third, if you include the opening sequence) is some great, over the top splatter fare and was probably my favourite sequence in the movie, if I’m honest. Other than that, and the whole discussion I’m going to get into regarding women and especially LGBT representation after I’ve rated the movie, there isn’t really much of note going on. It’s a lot of stuff you’ve already seen, except in bad fake American accents that would have been every bit as effective set in Australia. There are some cool moments, and some things I liked, but there’s also a lot that is bland and repetitive and cliche. 

Rating: 4/10 - Ultimately forgettable, but a nice little weird movie about a murder box.

Important, and always going to impact on how I perceive a movie - specifically a horror movie: this movie has a lesbian couple, and though gross guys leer at them (which is reflective of something almost unavoidable in my own experience), they are very much only there as objects of attraction to each other. I don’t think the movie was in any way aiming to have a subplot of commentary on the sexualisation of queer women in horror, but my feminist reading of horror movies is probably always going to differ from the main one. Two ladies, dating, talking about meeting the parents…that’s shit you don’t see in horror movies. I’ll take what I can get. Not so hot on the eventual end points of either of the characters, but again, semi-slasher flick. I was unlikely to be satisfied on that front.

To bring a spoiler into it, I do find tremendous distaste in the “psycho lesbian” trope. There is a lot of overlap between being of a minority sexuality and mental illness for a huge array of social, religious, economic, political reasons, and to rely on a caricature for a plot point is just a really outdated, gross thing to use. That said, I appreciated that the killer reveal and rationale became the part of the movie where their sexuality and relationship became completely irrelevant - that is, the killer was going to be a killer regardless. It doesn’t completely save this idea from surfacing, but it does salvage it a bit - the same story could have been used for a straight character. 

Why am I being so spoiler sensitive? Are you ever going to watch a 2010 Australian horror movie about murder via ancient box? Probably not. And thus concludes probably the most intensive review of this decidedly not intense movie.