by Francis Friel

Synopsis:

What if a guy had horns that could mind-control everybody? Could that guy be played by Daniel Radcliffe? What if Daniel Radcliffe had horns? Can we throw in a thing where the whole thing kicks off with a pretty white girl getting brutally raped and murdered? Can we then explore how this tragedy effects all the men in her life? Can one of those guys have horns?

Review:

This movie is a fucking hate crime. 

Is there going to be a point where every single plot of every single movie doesn't revolve around a dead white woman's corpse? What do we have to do to eliminate this trope from every screenwriter's handbook? Or at the very least, how can we make it in any way meaningful to the actual plot? I would even settle for writers not agreeing ideologically that there's anything wrong with it if they could retire it simply because it's been done a million trillion goddamn times.

It's an even bigger shame because this movie is actually pretty good once the more interesting ideas start coming. The mind-control, the Metamorphosis stuff, the newscaster brawl... all great. The ending sequence in the woods where his final transformation(s) take place is pretty cool. But again, this script is completely evil and stupid.

Even the reasons for the initial murder turn out to be just random, unmotivated surprise character/tonal shifts. Characters who we first meet as just normal people turn out to be raving psychos, seemingly because the script can't function any other way. It's all premise and no story, no characters, no plot. Or rather, once the plot becomes more apparent, it becomes more and more ridiculous, to the point where I just kind of gave up and decided it wasn't gonna get better but I at least wanted to see how they ended this mess. Messily, as it turned out.

Aja is great with visuals and it's true for this film as well. But the weird darkness around the whole thing just ends up being ugly instead of interesting. And Radcliffe's accent is usually not bad, despite most of it being pretty obviously ADR'd to oblivion. 

Heather Graham shows up for a few scenes so she can wear a diner outfit that shows a lot of cleavage and wears bright red lipstick and is, overall, an awful piece of shit and a waste of a (sometimes) pretty great actor. Another terrible woman to fuck with the main male protagonist. 

And again, the fucking horns: for so much of this film being so symbolically on the nose (snakes, apples, pitchforks), it's almost impossible to discern the point of any of it. 

Fuck this movie. 

Overall Score: Hate Crime.