Post by Dracula on Oct 6, 2022 18:26:18 GMT -5
Smile(10/5/2022)
The new horror film Smile is, if nothing else, the beneficiary of some pretty canny marketing. I first learned about it when I went to see Top Gun: Maverick and was greeted with a cryptic 40 second teaser trailer (which was never officially released online) that mostly just featured a creepy dude smiling and the movie’s title. More recently they’ve pulled a stunt of putting creepy smiling people behind home plate at MLB games, so Paramount is certainly putting some work into this release, but I was kind of skeptical just the same. The movie has all the hallmarks of being one of these jump scare dependent mainstream-ass ghost/haunting movies that I thought we were getting past… and it is that, but it’s one of the good ones. The film’s plot concerns a demonic curse in which people suddenly have their minds taken over and then kill themselves with an unmoving Cheshire grin across their faces, and this passes the curse on to whoever witnesses this and they are tormented with visions for a week before they then die similarly passing it on to the next person, and so on. So, it’s basically Ringu except with facial gestures instead of evil videotapes, not the most original idea and the basic plot progression probably won’t surprise viewers who’ve seen enough of these movies but the smiling gimmick is just enough to make the film feel kind of fresh. Additionally, the film also takes mental illness as a theme a bit more seriously than the average horror film as the protagonist is a hospital psychiatrist and past traumas do become a theme in the film. Beyond that the movie mostly just works because director Parker Finn uses this familiar bag of tricks pretty darn effectively and even when he uses shameless jump scares he tends to employ them in less predictable ways. Put it this way, when someone finally writes the book on “early 21st Century ghost movies for normies” this one will be sitting next to the better examples of the genre like Sinister and Oculus rather than the trash Conjuring spinoffs.
***1/2 out of Five
The new horror film Smile is, if nothing else, the beneficiary of some pretty canny marketing. I first learned about it when I went to see Top Gun: Maverick and was greeted with a cryptic 40 second teaser trailer (which was never officially released online) that mostly just featured a creepy dude smiling and the movie’s title. More recently they’ve pulled a stunt of putting creepy smiling people behind home plate at MLB games, so Paramount is certainly putting some work into this release, but I was kind of skeptical just the same. The movie has all the hallmarks of being one of these jump scare dependent mainstream-ass ghost/haunting movies that I thought we were getting past… and it is that, but it’s one of the good ones. The film’s plot concerns a demonic curse in which people suddenly have their minds taken over and then kill themselves with an unmoving Cheshire grin across their faces, and this passes the curse on to whoever witnesses this and they are tormented with visions for a week before they then die similarly passing it on to the next person, and so on. So, it’s basically Ringu except with facial gestures instead of evil videotapes, not the most original idea and the basic plot progression probably won’t surprise viewers who’ve seen enough of these movies but the smiling gimmick is just enough to make the film feel kind of fresh. Additionally, the film also takes mental illness as a theme a bit more seriously than the average horror film as the protagonist is a hospital psychiatrist and past traumas do become a theme in the film. Beyond that the movie mostly just works because director Parker Finn uses this familiar bag of tricks pretty darn effectively and even when he uses shameless jump scares he tends to employ them in less predictable ways. Put it this way, when someone finally writes the book on “early 21st Century ghost movies for normies” this one will be sitting next to the better examples of the genre like Sinister and Oculus rather than the trash Conjuring spinoffs.
***1/2 out of Five
