Here’s a tip: When you google images of this movie to include in your online horror review, make sure that SafeSearch is on.
When I review an excellent movie, it’s intimidating, because I want to do justice to something that has been executed with great skill. It’s also rewarding, because there are generally a lot of meaty themes and innovative techniques to delve into, and I enjoy analyzing what makes a project a success. When I review a terrible movie, I get excited. There is nothing more fun than venting my frustration with an incompetent or misguided film, and its generally my best chance to be funny (and petty). I basically get to take revenge on a movie for wasting my time. Frequently, though, I end up reviewing films that land on the spectrum of “kind of bad” to “pretty solid”. The horror genre, like all movie genres, subsists largely on the big, bulbous middle of the bell curve. These are the movies that make this blog tough. In lieu of having enough salient analysis to fill a modest post, I will often resort to sneaky tactics like spending the whole opening paragraph on metatextual jibber-jabber about the writing process.
So, Girls with Balls. This movie was fine. It was kind of fun, gory in parts, mildly funny in others. My guess is that the filmmakers (from France and Belgium, btw, so prepare for some mediocre English dubbing) are the types of people that would read, or even write, a blog series like this. The trouble with that is that horror movies made by horror fans tend to be smart-alecky and winking at the audience rather than actually scary or bringing something new to bear. On occasion, you end up with something pointedly hilarious like Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, or transcendentally gruesome like Dead Alive, or both like Cabin in the Woods. Usually, though, you get something like Girls with Balls, which is agreeably violent and humorous and self-aware, but hardly something I will be thinking about by the time November rolls around. The plot involves a female volleyball team (hence the titular, and testicular, pun) being chased through the countryside by a gaggle of murderous rednecks. Hillbillies with a penchant for dismemberment has been a worn out horror trope for ages now, but they make fine enough antagonists in this scenario (the movie even trots out a joke about how overused they are as a plot device). The troupe suffers through deaths, infighting, betrayal and crises of confidence, before a final showdown between the survivors and the redneck cabal. Again, it’s a pretty fun piece of action, but it can only deliver so much without a real sense of danger or stakes. When the movie is so interested in drawing attention to the fact that it is a clever take on horror movies, it never lets you suspend your disbelief and forget you are watching a movie long enough to get invested.
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