You're Next - Movie Review

Starring Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, AJ Bowen, Wendy Glenn, Joe Swanberg, Rob Moran, Amy Seimetz and Barbara Crampton.
Directed by Adam Wingard.

★★★½

The trailer for this horror flick looked pretty generic, but that's because it was saving the best parts of the movie to be a surprise.  I wouldn't have guessed this movie would be as funny as it was.  It may be the funniest movie I've ever seen about a family getting slaughtered.

Mother and Father have invited their four grown children and their significant others to a fixer-upper in the woods.  It's been years since they've all been together, and soon as they are, the old bickering and sibling rivalry ramps right up.  But then some killers wearing animal masks attack their home and start killing them one by one.  Who are these guys?  Is this random, or is there something about this family that makes them the target?

What's funny is that the sibling rivalry doesn't take a pause even while they clearly need to work together to survive the night.

There's one scene where a character is about to do something stupid. And anyone who's ever seen a horror movie knows it's stupid, and the whole theater was just laughing that person was going to go through with it anyway.

I like that they used unknown actors, so we don't really know who's going to live or die or what the axing order might be.

This is a done-to-death genre, so it's wonderful to see someone inject life and new ideas into it.

Upstream Color - DVD Review

Starring Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig and Thiago Martins.
Directed by Shane Carruth.

★★★½

I never thought I'd love a movie that was told in mostly montages, but this weird, weird movie pulled it off.  It has a plot in its head, but if it was told straightforward, I don't think it would make much sense.  By telling the story in a more abstract fashion, it worked, leaving more open for interpretation.

We find a man identified as the Thief, who's found a drug that he can put in worms.  When a person ingests the worm, it puts them in a hypotized state, where the person will do or see anything someone else says.  While in this state, the Thief gets the person to empty their bank accounts and take large loans. He makes off with the money, and the victim is left with amnesia.  We see this happen to Kris (The Killing's Amy Seimetz), and there is another man identified as the Sampler.  The Sampler helps extract the worm from her system, and he then puts the worm into a pig.

Months later, she's getting her life back on track, and somewhere in there she meets Jeff (Carruth), whom we gather had the same thing happen to him. And it goes from there.

How much choice to we have in the choices we make? Why do people connect? How much of this was in her head? It's all open. I have my own theories on what it all meant, what really happened, and I've started reading the others. It's a movie that made my mind swim.