Tuesday, March 24, 2015
I hadn’t seen a horror movie in about 20 years (since Robin doesn’t like them), but it was “Girls Night Out” last Saturday night, so I decided to see “It Follows,” a new horror movie with very good reviews.The film has a creative plot. The monster is a venereal disease! If a person has sex with someone, then he/she must sleep with someone else within a few days and pass it on, or the monster will come after that person and kill him/her in a very gory and violent way. What’s even worse is that after doing so, it then will come after the preceding person, going down the line, until one of them has sex with a new person again. (Perhaps this is a morality tale about the dangers of teenage sex.)Our pretty teenage heroine, Jay (Maika Monroe), had sex with Hugh, but then learns that he has passed on the monster to her, and that she needs to have sex with someone else ASAP or she will be killed. He feels very guilty about having done so, but he had no choice if he wanted to stay alive.Jay enlists her sister and some friends to help her. The monster can look like any person, so it is tricky; however, one can recognize it because it walks very slowly, so one can temporarily escape it. The monster has ghost-like powers: it is invisible to everyone except the person it is after.As an aside, in addition to its obvious deficiencies as a tennis partner, the monster always has a mean expression on his/her face and never seems to be having a good day.Unfortunately, the movie, at times, drags along at the same pace as the monster. The film has some mildly scary moments, but I was never terrified, and there weren’t enough suspenseful scenes to compensate for the slow parts. These teenagers are smart and do reasonable things to try to avoid the monster, even coming up with an ingenious plan to try to kill it; however, the film lacks the classic idiotic move by a soon-to-be-killed character, such as leaving the house door wide open.The Writer/Director had a very interesting concept, but it just wasn’t developed well enough. It also has an ambiguous ending, which I found unsatisfying. “It follows,” therefore, that this movie is an OTBR. (On The Bubble Rental).Dave
