First, the poster sucks. I don't know who that woman is or what the scissors have to do with anything but that isn't this movie. This is a slasher movie about five friends that go to an isolated cabin where there's no cell reception and end up getting terrorized by a maniac in a clown face paint. What makes it different is they are British so they deserve it. No, just kidding. They are British, but what makes it different is that almost the entire movie is filmed in one continuous take.
The story: Five friends. Isolated cabin. Clown-guy terrorizes and kills them.
This is a movie I wanted to like a lot more. I liked the idea of it all being in one take, helping us feel the trapped, clostrophobia of the characters. And the director does a good job of starting slowly, letting a lot of the early part of the story be funny and lighter, building to the entrance of the killer clown and then trying to scare us. And technically the director did a good job. Doing long takes is hard technically and I thought overall they were very good and efficient with it.
But...
Well, to do something like this you need to get a few things right. The first is the ratcheting up of the tension and here it just doesn't work. I mean, it's a guy in clown paint and they start freaking out even though there are five of them. And right from the start you are going to have trouble because, well, it's a guy in clown face. Maybe clowns are supposed to be scary, but guy's in clown face are kind of pathetic to me, even really big ones. So is the antagonist supposed ot be scary or just a big loser? So right there you have this huge problem that when the movie is supposed to switch from lighter to scarier, I couldn't take any of it seriously.
Which makes for a big problem as the movie goes on because even though the idea is that one location/one shot should make you feel claustrophobic and highten the tension it never really does. It just doesn't scare.
So does the movie work as a horror movie? No.
And how's the comedy? Well, some of it is kind of clever but none of it is that funny. And that's the other problem -- there's no story. There's trying to be funny parts and trying to be scary parts, but there's no actual story. Compare that to THE STRANGERS. That has two people struggling as they realize they are going to break up in spite of the fact that they still love each other. So right away there's this weird tension between them. Then you introduce the strangers and everything becomes ratched up as you slip into a horror movie. Or take WEST WING, which often would keep things light for the first couple acts, but again they were dealing with serious things. Now, you could say that being attacked is the serious thing, but being attacked by a guy in clown face is such a weird over-the-top thing that it's hard to take seriously.
Another way to look at it is what's the B-story? The A-story is the attack, so what's the other part, the emotional part...and there really isn't anything there. There's a pregnancy mentioned, but not much is made of it and it certainly doesn't play out in the rest of the movie. There is this beginning part with a clown in a child's bedroom, but that's not really the story either. I don't know. There was just nothing else.
So does it work as a story? As a comedy? Well, no.
Now, I don't want to make it sound like I hated it. I didn't. There are some twists that are okay, and having it all play out in one take was interesting to me on a technical level at least. But really, unless the one take thing interests you, or unless you have a thing for clown killers, or unless you know one of the actors and think they are a lot more funny than I thought they were, then there just wasn't anything else in the movie for you.
*** PASS ***
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