I confess I did not really watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, let alone the movie. Only with Firefly did I become a mild fan of Joss Whedon. It made sense for him to return to writing horror, with past comrade Drew Goddard, for a bit; in other genres, he loves to kill at least one of the heroes eventually.
If the title sounds awfully generic for horror, that's deliberate. It's no spoiler to say that this movie combines dozens of classics and not-so-classics of the genre...with The Truman Show. A secret, possibly government agency is basically making a scare-by-number horror flick featuring five young adults (the only actor among them you're likely to know is Chris Hemsworth), who thought it'd be fun to camp off the grid, unaware that they're being manipulated to engineer their deaths...at first. We see plenty of scenes at HQ, where the humans (among them Bradley Whitford and Sigourney Weaver) seem like ordinary people aside from their lack of sympathy for the victims. How could they do this? Well...
Make no mistake: The zombies they release on the victims are "real" within the confines of TCitW, as are the numerous other monsters mentioned or shown. The intended audience for these murders is a horde of Lovecraftian underground ancient beings, who demand human sacrifice according to rules (e.g., the good girl dies last if at all) that vary by time and place, with similar sacrifices being attempted around the world. The conspirators must fancy themselves the true heroes of the story for appeasing the alleged gods so they don't rise up and kill allegedly all humans. Whom exactly do we root for?
Actually, this setup brings up a lot more questions than that. Just how long have organizations been making such sacrifices, and how frequently? How have they maintained secrecy? How do the ancients communicate their changing specific preferences? Why do they stay below? Is periodically appeasing them by unethical means really the best bet? But many horrors seem to thrive on unanswered questions. Besides, when it's clearly satire, not everything has to make sense.
Things start to go "off script" when one intended victim accidentally finds a hidden camera. Of course, when the enemy is both invincible and incorrigible, the question is just how unhappy the ending will be. Without giving it away, let me just say that I can't easily picture a sequel.
This being a Mutant Enemy production, the CG is less than state of the art. That's OK; we get no better from most of the genre. Really, it was already hard to take the premises seriously.
Maybe you think that horror and comedy go together like toothpaste and orange juice. But I found An American Werewolf in London both moderately funny and moderately scary, sometimes in the same moment. I expected as much from Whedon, with his knack for amusing lines and unanticipated turns.
Does it work? Well, I'm sure it helps if you've seen far more of the parodied movies than I have. I recognized a few key references, including a knockoff of Pinhead from Hellraiser (which I might review later this month), but not many. It could be fun to start viewing them as the product of this conspiracy. As it is, I smiled inside a few times and felt...not fear so much as intensity.
TCitW gets high marks on Rotten Tomatoes, but IMDb indicates that many viewers either don't know what to make of it or simply don't care for it. I think its present rating of a solid 7.0 is about right. At the very least, it has enriched my October with a purer Halloween-type viewing than in my last couple reviews.
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