Jamie
Fear is fantastic. Life changing really. All this time I was walking around not understanding the world. Like FDR stated to the nation “the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” I’m like, sure, but what about a vampire, FDR? Pretty scary stuff. But now I understand. He wasn’t talking about “fear” as a concept. He was talking about Fear the movie. Now I’m vibing, Frankie D. And take Star Wars. Yoda is all like “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” I’m like, yo, yoda, hold up. I’d be pretty scared of a Wookiee. He’d rip my arms off if he loses (and I always win). That won’t lead to the Dark Side. That’s just common sense. But now I’m back on Team Yoda. Fear definitely leads to anger, hate, suffering and the Dark Side. Yoda man, yoda. So there we go. Even before they made Fear, two of the greatest Americans of all time were lining up against it. Let’s see if they were right.
To recap, a bunch of dummies travel up to a closed resort in the middle of the pandemic in order to celebrate a birthday (and an engagement if the main character Rom would stop chickening out). His girlfriend, Bianca, has asthma and is skeptical about why they are up there. Rom is an author and everyone’s a little suspicious that maybe they are up there as part of research for his next book. He’s like “no, no” but really that’s exactly why they are there. Some spooky stuff starts happening, like the creepy resort owner feeds them garbage wine and their minds play some tricks on them, but really the scariest thing is Lou. You see, Lou is coughing a bunch and they are afraid he’s got Covid. Shortly thereafter they see a news report that a new super deadly strain of Covid is out and that everyone needs to stay inside. They throw Lou in the basement and one of their friends rushes out to be with her kid against their protests. When people find out what they did with Lou they go down to free him, but find him dead. Soon everyone is dying in a bunch of uninteresting ways vaguely connected to their own worst fears. By the end Bianca escapes to town where she finds that everything is OK and it was just the resort being a silly goose and pranking them. You done been Punk’d. THE END.
Woof. This movie is terrible. What a waste of time and potential. I could think up a million different ways that this could have worked. The first way was to make the fears interesting and then actually have them die that way. Claustrophobia, drownings, spiders, snakes, heights, etc. etc. etc. Now have a giant spider eat one of them. Instead they all die in super boring ways after we wade through a full hour of no one dying at all. It’s just a bunch of people fretting about Super Covid and bad mouthing T.I. There was a brief moment in the beginning where I thought we were going to get an old school slasher film like April Fool’s Day… but then it droned on and on and was just a dumb supernatural horror film. I hated this.
Hot Take Clam Bake. We shouldn’t have watched this. I know doing BMT is all about watching bad movies like this but, sigh, this wasn’t worth our time. We shouldn’t have watched this at all. We just shouldn’t have. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could go back and not watch this. It makes me question what we are up to. Does something need to change? How is it that we ended up having to watch this? Is BMT broken? Did we err in some way at some point? We just… we shouldn’t have watched this. Hot Take Temperature: Volcano.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Remember when horror films were scary or had any interesting ideas or (frankly) reasons to exist. Pepperidge Farm remembers. Let’s go!
This. Is. The. Worst. Film. I’ve. Seen. This. Year.
This film isn’t funny, charming, entertaining, nothing. This movie is garbage. It is a net negative. I cannot believe this was screened to producers and audiences and they went fuck it, release it, horror just prints money right?
Like, as we were watching this film we realized with growing fear (ha!) that we made a horrible mistake … obviously we should have done Five Nights at Freddy’s. This is a non-movie and doesn’t even deserve to be watched. This is the kind of movie where we are like “wait … are we somehow doing too many movies for BMT? Can we tweak the qualifications so that this specifically doesn’t qualify in the future?”
That would be my fear death. I would drink the fear juice and then later I would go into a trance and find myself in a theater watching Fear and being like “NO! I can’t watch this movie again!” And then ultimately I would walk over and like smash my face into a trashcan in the theater and in real life and die.
I’ve just been making fun of this movie. But there really isn’t anything redeemable here. The concept is stupid (an author drags his friends to a hotel with allegations of a witch coven based on fear, yada yada yada they all die from fear nonsense except the two that leave). The entire relationship to the pandemic is stupid (I don’t know if there are people in real life as stupid as the people in this movie are … I sure hope not). And it isn’t scary, the cardinal sin of horror. There is truly nothing about this movie I would call a kernel of an idea. It is all quite bad. And that is why it is the worst film of the year for me.
But even that is somehow being generous. There is no reason this should have been released to theaters. It should have been on Shudder where horror fans could have gone “meh” and I could have ignored it.
I’m going to go with Worst Twist (How?) for the obvious reveal that the entire second pandemic was fake news brought to you by the Lying Witch Coven of Strawberry Lodge. Sorry, the Strawberry Lodge witches merely subscribe to alternative facts, specifically that there is a severe airborne threat and you should all hang out in Strawberry Lodge. This movie is bad bad bad bad bad bad bad, and I really hope I don’t even give it the Bad award for BMT because it was too bad even for that.
Oh jesus, can I make a sequel to this … of course I can! One word: baby. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 