Review by Dustin Hall
You’re Next is one of those films I almost hate to review, because I liked it a great deal, but that was aided by the fact that I had no idea what I was walking into. In fact, the trailer for this film advertises something completely different than what is actually shown on the screen. So, if you want a surprise, just take my word for it, go see the movie. But if you don’t mind a few spoilers…
You’re Next opens much as the trailer suggests, as another dry, humdrum home invasion movie. I mean, I get it, home invasion is probably one of the scariest concepts you can imagine, the potential violence towards loved ones, the violation of your security, but there are plenty of movies covering this well-documented ground, and they seldom offer anything different. So I went to the screening of You’re Next, not drawn at all by the run-of-the-mill trailers, but solely by the fact that the ticket was free.
And for the first 20 or 30 minutes, the film met my expectations exactly. It opens with boobs (yay!) and a drawn out little murder vignette to grab the action-starved audience, followed by the usual positioning of family units in a web of drama. To be sure, character building is important, but from the start the characters were strangely acted, some over the top, some stilted, and overall the family of one-percenters snarking it up in their woodland chateau failed to connect with me at all. In fact, I thought I was watching one of the sloppiest, most cliché movie openings I’d seen in a long time.
And then, suddenly, Ti West takes an arrow to the head and it all changes.
Yeah, you start looking at the film a little differently when you realize that Ti West, director of House of the Devil makes a little cameo in there. Not to mention AJ Bowen, who was in that film and also the neat little indie apocalypse film The Signal. And also Barbara Crampton of Re-Animator fame, who’s still looking good enough to inspire me to cut off my own head and go down on her with it. This cast is like a set of living, breathing clues about the film’s genre that had been entirely missed up to this point, but now, You’re Next became awesome.
Instead of another dry, groan inducing home invasion film, we get something that seems to resemble the worst home invasion film ever made, completely intentionally. The rich, ego maniac characters flip out over everything, constantly. They never stop delivering insults and one-liners to each other in the most inappropriate moments. We get treated to the tropes about cell-phones not working, characters having inappropriate knowledge for exposition purposes, and somehow, somehow, a survival expert got invited to the party just to make sure everyone lives long enough to make the movie run for 90 minutes.
Amidst all of the chaos, however, the murders are still actually performed with a fairly gritty realism, lacking in the over the top blood spray of something like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. People die with frank, brutal quickness, and you almost forget it’s a comedy, until someone’s Goth girlfriend suddenly decides they want to have sex on one of the corpses. It’s odd and different, and the darkest of comedies. Adam Wingard (Pop Skull, V/H/S 1 and 2) has managed to set up a cast of characters that we all hate, and then put them in either the sloppiest horror movie ever, or one of the best strange comedies I’ve seen in a bit.
The only complaint, not enough Barbara Crampton. Aside from having always gotten my pineal gland to stand erect, her character is kind and suffers from some undefined, paranoia inducing mental disorder, and other than battle-girl Sharni Vinson (Step Up 3D, incredibly), stands out as the only likable character. Her screen time could have been expanded upon, if not only for her horror pedigree, but also to add a bit more emotional weight into the whole oddball package.
This is why I try not to read reviews going into a film. The sheer joy of being taken off guard. And now that you’ve read this, you’ve been deprived of that joy. You masochist. Regardless, You’re Next is a quirky lampooning of an otherwise tired genre, and worth checking out with an unsuspecting audience.
You’re Next hits US cinemas on 23rd August. It premieres in the UK at Film4 FrightFest, before hitting cinemas on 28th August.