Bonus review time! Yes, you get two reviews this weekend for the price of one! And you got the first one for free, so you're really making out like a bandit this weekend, aren't you? Yes, you are!
First, let me preface this review by saying, I hate horror movies with kids in them. It's almost always about the kids, and never about the horror. Look at Friday the 13th, part 4. Jason is having a blast, offing campers left and right, for three movies (okay, two if you don't count the first one, because that was his mom), and then little Tommy Jarvis comes along and BAM! Jason is dead. See? See what happens when you introduce kids into horror films? Yea. Bad shit happens.
The Babadook (2014) is about a single mother with few friends and a rambunctiously weird little brat who live alone. Apparently, her husband died some years previous, and she has been having a hard time raising the little shit on her own. I say little shit because the brat is overwhelmingly annoying and out of control, or at least, that's how it seems. After reading a bedtime story to the kid about The Babadook, a creepy story about a killer stalking a boy and his mother, the boy becomes obsessed with The Babadook and then even the mother starts seeing it. Then, all hell breaks loose. Oh yea. You know that's how all these horror movies end, don't you? Hell breaks loose. It's apparently a very common phobia.
I did not like this movie. One, to say it's a slow starter would be an understatement. I'd just arisen from an afternoon nap when I started it, and it almost put me to sleep again. The first hour is nothing but build-up, back story, and the normal day-to-day shit that all of us have to get through just to make it to the good parts. Only, there are no good parts. The house they live in is drab and colorless. The mother is unattractive and her child looks like every other kid in his school. There's no nudity. There's not even really a monster until they read about the Babadook, and that doesn't come until halfway through the movie. The fact that I fast-forwarded through a couple boring interludes might not surprise you, but the fact that I did it near the end, when the supposedly good parts were going on, should tell you just how bad it was.
A lot of reviews on Netflix (where I watched the movie) will tell you how great the movie is, and give it 5 stars for originality. Not really sure where the originality comes in. Pretty sure Psycho brought in the whole psycho-thriller subject and there have been countless imitations since. Ah. Good parts. Good parts. Nope. Not really recalling any. I guess the acting was okay? There weren't really any well-known actors in this. The mother and her boy were the main characters, pretty much the only characters. If you were to replace boredom with fear, then this movie would have caused many a heart attack. Instead, I bet it put a lot of people to sleep. The reviews on Netflix go on and on about how the reviewers who didn't understand the movie are the ones who didn't give it 5 stars. No, I understood it, all right. I got the gist of it from about 10 minutes in. And then it took over an hour for the movie to drive their point home.
Maybe if I give you a body count, it would help, without giving away too much. I don't want to spoil the movie, just in case you want to watch it. Let's see, there was one dead dog. A book was destroyed. Twice. There was one bloody nose. Some blood from a leg wound. A few stitches. I think that was about it? Not a good body count, is it? Well, there you go.
That's all for tonight. Game of Thrones is on. Enjoy your week. :-)
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