I use the term Hulu Horror loosely in reference to most of the films in this bunch, but I sat through them, so now I shall share my thought about them. So let’s get into it.
SPREE (2020)
How far will kids go these days to be viral internet sensations? Kurt has been trying since he was a little kid, but his channel just isn’t getting the hits.
Then he comes up with an idea. He’s a rideshare driver, so he sets up cameras in his car and begins killing customers while filming.
There’s plenty of political and social commentary as he takes down certain types, like a white supremacist douche, womanizing douche, and a trio of shallow urbanites (Ariana Grande’s brother Frankie, Lala from Vanderpump Rules, and Mischa Barton). There are also some satisfyingly gruesome kills conceptually, but the death scenes are mostly implied with minimal gore.
Despite its dark, nihilistic perspective on social media and lust for fame, I felt the film just didn’t go edgy or shocking enough. Like this could have been 90s Tarantino violent but it wasn’t, and only a few scenes really stood out for me. On the bright side, that includes the final scene, which turns into a battle between Kurt and a passenger that turns out to be the final girl.
Also keep an eye out for David Arquette as his dad.
THE OWNERS (2020)
I don’t know what it is lately, but everything is feeling so derivative to me, and not even in the sense that at least they’re doing cliché good enough to give me familiar, satisfying thrills.
The Owners is about a bunch of kids breaking into a house to rob an old couple. They explore the house, ransack it a bit, and then the old couple comes home.
The kids tie up the old couple and then begin fighting over what to do with them. When things escalate badly, the kids have to turn to the old man for help because he’s a doctor.
And of course the couple seems a little off…
We get the sense they’re hiding something, it seems they’re hiding something in the basement, eventually we find out the truth, and when we do, it’s just dumbfounding that the whole movie was leading up to this. Seriously, this is as anticlimactic as this type of movie gets.
SAVE YOURSELVES! (2020)
Save Yourselves! seemed like a cute and funny play on Critters that I could watch with the hubby, and I even showed him the trailer first to get his approval…after which I warned him it looked like it would have some fun and funny moments but could definitely be a bit slow. I wasn’t wrong.
There is fun to be had for sure, however, the film is virtually carried by the male and female lead, who spend most of the time alone at a cabin in the woods after they decide they need a break from city and cyber life.
They’re charming together, with him delivering the goofy, geeky comedy while she provides the dry humor. But since this doesn’t have a massive budget, there aren’t hordes of the critters. Actually, there is only one scene in which there are several on screen at once. Other than that, there’s just one at a time.
The funniest part of this creature feature comedy is that the couple calls the little furballs poofs. No matter how many times they said it, the hubby and I laughed. Maybe it’s a gay thing.
The film is slow getting to the first poof attack, and once the poofs do attack, the poofs don’t have faces. The poofs are just furballs that move around by shooting a stick tentacle out of their poof bodies to attach to things.
Things pick up most in the final act when the couple tries to escape the cabin, leading to a curiously bizarre and trippy ending that allows you to draw your own conclusions.
ANTEBELLUM (2020)
This film started with some major slavery shit, with Janelle Monáe being abused by a white master. I was ready to turn it off, because I’m so not up for watching Black people being tortured (especially having just forced myself to sit through the entire Them show on Prime), but a friend told me the film wasn’t just 105 minutes of that, so I stuck with it.
Basically, Janelle seems to be living two existences, teleporting through time as a slave in the past and as an author in the present, and a cell phone appears to be the key to her jumps back and forth.
**SORT OF SPOILER** Honestly, this really is not a horror or sci-fi film. Instead, it uses a very cheap tactic to create a sense of mystery even though this isn’t even a mystery, which you only learn when the truth of what’s going on is revealed at the very end. The surprise twist is cool only because the film manipulated the context of the story completely to make it a twist, and that just pisses me off. It also creates a bizarre plot hole involving the appearance of what your made to believe is a ghost girl…which I now think wasn’t a ghost at all and therefore not a plot hole. Sigh.
