The Guest
My Review: This is not necessarily a horror movie. It’s pretty iffy, but hey, it’s probably good that you can’t always nail movies into specific boxes. I declare the massive overabundance of jack-o-lanterns to justify it as a BHE review. Anyway, in this movie, a soldier shows up at a family’s house and says he was friends with their son, who was a soldier that died recently. They invite him in to get to know him and practically adopt him because they’re a little odd. Turns out, he’s evil.
Towards the end, the movie kind of transforms into a crazy military action showdown with all sorts of machine guns and walls getting blown apart, but with Jason/Michael Myers as one of the sides in the conflict, practically. It’s a little different. I thought this whole outcome was relatively disappointing (and the final twist even more disappointing - it was the kind of twist that really says “the movie shouldn’t end here, but hey, our run time is up!”), but it was still pretty fun. It seemed like the mystery of this clearly weird soldier who insinuated himself into their lives, and taught their kids some really dark lessons, should’ve come out to a more interesting resolution. But what they did works, it’s an okay story. It’s just not amazing, and definitely didn’t melt my brain with shock and surprise. Oh, and the soundtrack was straight out of an 80’s movie (it turns out the music was made with the same type of synthesizers as John Carpenter used for Halloween 3, so there you go!).
My Rating: 3/5 Butterfly Knives.
My Movie Idea: Okay, this is a very transgressive idea that would
never be allowed by Hollywood, and probably will deeply offend half the people reading this. But I’m going to share it because it is actually the idea that came into my head while watching this movie. In my movie, there’s a kid in high school who is badly bullied and mistreated, and he’s all goth and sullen and withdrawn. And angry. The classic profile of a school shooter. Which is exactly what he intends to be. He is secretly obtaining an arsenal and making plans with a buddy or two who are similarly abused, preparing to shoot up the school and kill whoever they can before dying themselves. Yeah, it’s dark.
Anyway, before they get the chance to enact this plan, something big and bad goes down. There are a lot of things it could be, from a military invasion like Red Dawn to an alien invasion, but I think what I want it to be is that there are demons who are entering the world through a portal to witness the shooting to come (you can see a premise like this in Odd Thomas, by the way). Normally such demons are invisible and of no import, they just enjoy the killing and move on, but another goth kid at their school happens to be into witchcraft and fools around with the wrong spells, causing the demons this time to fully enter our reality, and they start going on a rampage of their own, murdering people and eating brains and whatever demons like to do. So guess what? Redemption, that’s what! The school shooter crew is very heavily armed and entirely prepared. They go in and wipe out the demons and in the process, they learn to care about other people, have self-esteem, and have empathy and become heroes as well. It’s a happy ending.
Oh and they get in huge trouble afterwards since all their guns and homemade bombs are highly illegal. Ooh, maybe the movie is framed with the homeland security interviews of them after the fact, and it goes back in flashbacks, so at first you think maybe they did shoot up a school.
