Post by Dracula on Nov 21, 2021 15:02:50 GMT -5
Antlers(10/31/2021)
I really need to stop falling for the phrase “From Executive Producer Guillermo del Toro” when it shows up in movie advertising. As much as I like a lot of that guy’s directorial efforts and even more important he speaks about horror cinema with incredible passion and intelligence; you would think he would be uniquely suited to curate interesting projects and guide them to similar greatness but all too often the movies he shepherds from the sidelines tend to be underwhelming stinkers like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Mama, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and the latest film to bear his name, Antlers, continues this rather unfortunate tradition. The advertising for Antlers suggests that it’s very interesting in Native American folklore traditions from which its central monster is derived but it’s really not. Native American folklore is the origin story for this monster (a Wendigo), but there’s only one Native American character and if he didn’t explain the monster’s Native American origins you wouldn’t know it. Instead the main theme and topic of the movie is the plight of rural whites in a meth addled poor region and generational child abuse, which could be a recipe for an interesting horror flick but the final film doesn’t seem terribly knowledgeable about either topic and can’t really bear the weight of its thematic ambitions. It wants to tackle the opioid epidemic but seems uninterested in its origins or the deeper level of its effects and it wants to talk about child neglect but doesn’t seem to have the slightest bit of understanding how basic systems like Child Protective Services work. So does the film work as a basic horror movie? Well, it has its moments. The monster itself looks pretty cool once it finally shows up and there are some decent scares, but it’s bad at establishing the “rules” of how the monster works and you generally wish the movie would lighten up just a bit instead of trying to be smarter than it really is.
** out of Five
I really need to stop falling for the phrase “From Executive Producer Guillermo del Toro” when it shows up in movie advertising. As much as I like a lot of that guy’s directorial efforts and even more important he speaks about horror cinema with incredible passion and intelligence; you would think he would be uniquely suited to curate interesting projects and guide them to similar greatness but all too often the movies he shepherds from the sidelines tend to be underwhelming stinkers like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Mama, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and the latest film to bear his name, Antlers, continues this rather unfortunate tradition. The advertising for Antlers suggests that it’s very interesting in Native American folklore traditions from which its central monster is derived but it’s really not. Native American folklore is the origin story for this monster (a Wendigo), but there’s only one Native American character and if he didn’t explain the monster’s Native American origins you wouldn’t know it. Instead the main theme and topic of the movie is the plight of rural whites in a meth addled poor region and generational child abuse, which could be a recipe for an interesting horror flick but the final film doesn’t seem terribly knowledgeable about either topic and can’t really bear the weight of its thematic ambitions. It wants to tackle the opioid epidemic but seems uninterested in its origins or the deeper level of its effects and it wants to talk about child neglect but doesn’t seem to have the slightest bit of understanding how basic systems like Child Protective Services work. So does the film work as a basic horror movie? Well, it has its moments. The monster itself looks pretty cool once it finally shows up and there are some decent scares, but it’s bad at establishing the “rules” of how the monster works and you generally wish the movie would lighten up just a bit instead of trying to be smarter than it really is.
** out of Five
