Vicious Fun Movie Review: Nothing 'Fun' About It
Vicious Fun is no fun at all, even though it is a hit on the streaming platform. Subhash K Jha reviews the film.
A hit on the streaming platform, Vicious Fun is no fun at all. Unless you think stabbing people in their eye and watching the eye come out of its socket with the sharp instrument , slashing throats, pounding nails on foreheads and other bloody activities are fun.
I have to admit, though, this is the first film I’ve seen where serials killings and killers are treated as a joke. When we meet them at a conference in the backroom of a pub (which looks like a set representing a pub, and goes well with the purposely stagy tone of the shudder inference) they are all sitting around telling each other about how many they’ve killed since they last convened and why one of them enjoys eating his victims body parts after killing them, the other kills and revives and kills the same victim over and over again.
The debasement of human value is savage. You can’t treat human beings as trash unless it is in a trashy film.
The film’s young witless protagonist Joel (Evan Marsh), a “horror critic” is the kind of nerd who always gets into trouble. One night while drinking himself silly he stumbles into a serial-killers’ convention.Jeol’s rather pathetic attempts to prove himself as one of them is vaguely funny, though not amusing enough for us to bear the maelstrom of mayhem that is unleashed .
The film is wall-to-wall carpetted with creepy violence, all done in a tone that suggests everyone on screen is having fun, why not you the audience? I am sure there are some out there who enjoy the sight of blood, puke and pukey bloodshed. But to others, the gore gets to be a bore .The serial killers have faces that have sociopaths written on them. Whoever said not to judge a book by its cover hasn’t seen this film.
Getting back to the plot, the bloodsoaked action moves from the above-mentioned pub into a police station where we meet the most cartoonish cops you’ve ever seen. These protectors of the law are so eye-rolling daft, you wonder if they are meant to be characters in a spoof on the law as the protector of the citizen.
Citizen Nerd Joel gets an interesting foil in Carrie (Amber Goldfarb) a serialkiller-buster with what one of the psychopaths describes as a “lesbian haircut”. It is interesting to see how Carrie’s character carries itself from the pigsty of sanguinary perverts to the role of a vigilante out to snuff all serial killers from the city. That Carrie ends up being as vicious as the killers is an irony that sits well in this douche bag horror-comedy.
The film has a splashy blotchy look, as though the frames were soaked in pink and red colours and then left to dry in the sun which,incidentally we never get to see in this nagging nocturnal blood-fest where the hero pukes every time a violent crime happens. We are just about able to control our rising aversion to the swelling tides of trashy perversion.
The question I want to ask is, why such a steep rise in America in horror films during these Covid times? Do people enjoy watching victims being slashed and stabbed as a manifestation of their inner frustrations?
Image Source: Instagram/viciousfunmovie/fsanders2/ambergoldfarb, youtube/shudder
Image Source: Instagram/viciousfunmovie/fsanders2/ambergoldfarb, youtube/shudder
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