Movie Review by Wes Forsythe
In honor of the New Year and this new feature of ScarefestRadio.com, this week’s Movies and Cocktails features New Year, New You from Hulu’s Into The Dark series.Let me start off by saying that this is a chick’s horror/thriller movie. The first half of the movie is absolutely loaded down with estrogen enriched girl talk, punctuated by FOREBODING.
Foreboding? Almost out of the gate we watch Alexis (Suki Waterhouse) checking the “fuse box” (or as a guy knows: the “breaker box” because it is 2018) to some of the most cliché horror movie music ever used.
Personally, I thought they more than used up their allotment of FOREBODING during the opening infomercial scene (a scene which, I might add, has a nicely balanced payoff at the end of the movie), but they just keep finding more. Kitchen knives? Let’s be sure to ominously zoom in on them, so that if they come into play later (spoiler alert: they do) no one can criticize the movie’s continuity by saying “where did they get those kitchen knives?”.
Another guy thing that popped into my head in the opening story setup: What kind of automotive malfunction makes an engine die, and all of the electrical components stop working except the headlights? I’ll bet you won’t find that in your car owner’s manual troubleshooting section.
The cast required for the story line felt almost as cliché as the background music. We have a beautiful blond with a FOREBODING facial scar. We have the black girlfriend (who -spoiler alert- you just know is going to die first because…horror movies). We have the cute but overweight girl that uses humor to mask her pain. And finally our antagonist: the infomercial self-help, new-age, beauty bitch who is so over-the-top annoying that we all hope to ourselves that she doesn’t turn out to be some sort of antihero.
And insert more FOREBODING.
I will admit that I was impressed that Scarred Blond could get a band-aid to stick to her wet finger. It’s not an important plot point, but I obviously need to buy better bandages.
Anyhow, three-quarters of the way through the movie the FOREBODING ends and we get down to the psycho slasher stuff that we came for. While it wasn’t overly graphic – if you’re into that sort of thing, the movie at this point does get to moving at brisk pace that almost makes all that girl talk and FOREBODING worth while.
Some other takeaways from the movie?
How this wasn’t subtitled “Bitches Be Crazy” is a travesty, and pillows make shitty weapons.
While this is definitely NOT a guy’s horror movie (not only because it is devoid of nudity), I have to admit that the final scene brought a smile to my face. If you can sit through the first hour, the epilogue almost makes it all seem worthwhile.