Ok movie, cute title, but don’t get ahead of yourself. That’s for internet smart-asses like me to decide.
There is always a point in these marathons where I sit down to review a movie and find that I don’t have much to say about it. How’s that for a hook to keep reading! Anyway, these are flicks that tend to have modest aspirations and fall in the “solid but unexceptional” category. A Classic Horror Story, as you have probably guessed, fits this bill to a tee. The acting is decent, although I watched it dubbed to English from its original Italian and I find that makes it much harder to judge the acting ability than hearing the original actors. I am certainly not averse to subtitles, by the way, but that’s a little harder than I care to work for a random Wednesday night Netflix selection. The direction sets an appropriately tense tone, if not bringing anything novel to bear on the material. I think if the filmmakers are anchoring on one thing for their audience to engage with, it is the referential, borderline metatextual elements that start to creep in part way through. This is a horror movie that wants to show off the fact that it’s a horror movie, and spends a lot of energy signaling that in various ways. Sometimes that can be fun, but I found it a little empty in this instance.
So the plot: A group of travelers in the Italian country-side run afoul of some kind of cult that wants to torture and kill them. This being a horror movie, the cult succeeds in doing so to most of the characters. Also under the “this being a horror movie” banner, things are not exactly as they seem. I’m generally not a torture-cult kind of horror fan, but A Classic Horror Story did a solid job of making the violence appropriately gory and horrifying without reveling in its depiction. I can’t say I fell in love with any of the characters, but there was enough there to clear the very low bar of not wanting them to have their eyes carved out and that sort of thing. The referential stuff is what turned me slightly against the film. There is the requisite name dropping of other horror icons (Leatherface and Jason are both brought up, and Evil Dead is alluded to), but that is a pretty common practice among horror fans who grow up to make horror movies of their own. The inevitable plot twist also plays into a meta take on horror films, but I will steer clear of that conversation as to avoid spoilers. There is a truly bizarre scene that still has me scratching my head, where Midsommar is mimicked so obviously that Ari Aster probably has a legal case if he wanted to make it. What’s so perplexing is that I don’t know what the scene was meant to accomplish and, unless I’m just missing an homage to a movie I’m not familiar with, it’s the only time the film goes beyond character dialogue to bring in elements from other horror films.* Finally, there is a mid-credit sequence which has someone reviewing footage filmed in the film (its complicated) and giving a negative reaction. It’s the typical, jokey, “I’m going to insult my own movie with all the critiques that I imagine others will have before they get the chance so you know that I’m in on it” BS that drives me crazy. All of these meta elements provide the movie with a little extra personality, but I think it ends up being a crutch for not having anything to say. And I’m actually cool with a scary movie that doesn’t have broader ambitions, but in that case don’t introduce all this extra winky stuff that distracts from your story. I don’t know, though, this might be my problem. Everybody went gaga over the meta elements of Scream, and I didn’t think they added much (despite enjoying the film quite a bit).
So there you go. I’m still not sure I had much to say about A Classic Horror Film, but in the grand tradition of A Classic Horror Film, I didn’t let not having much to say stop me.
* Reflecting back, there was I guess a visual reference to Wicker Man as well, so maybe I did miss a richer vein of callbacks to classic horror. The Midsommar scene did still stop me in my tracks for how egregious it was.
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