Welcome to Thunderdome

This movie is getting tons of hype right now, and my youngest demanded we go on opening night to avoid spoilers.

Let me throw some warnings at you that I will put behind a spoiler tag in case you want to go in completely fresh.

This is not a feel good movie. You're going to leave the theater feeling less than awesome. You'll have a lot to discuss, but nobody will be smiling.

Based upon some video clips I've seen, the theater where we saw this movie had it too dark. That can make it a tougher watch, but I don't believe we missed anything. Honestly, it might have made the film more effective. I don't know.

The story has Bear pining over Nikki, but he's too much of a pussy to do anything about it. He ends up making a wish with a One Wish...I forget the name, but they're selling out in real life, because of course they are... As you know if you're cultured, or if you've seen the Simpsons episode about the monkey paw (where the writer got his inspiration for this movie, not kidding), then you know that wishes come with a huge caveat of "Be careful what you wish for."

All the acting is very good throughout, but I hesitate to give anyone standout props because I think the material and direction did a lot of the heavy lifting. Inde Navarrette, deservedly is getting loads of praise, and she absolutely delivers. Michael Johnston does a great job basically reacting to everything Nikki does. Going deeper into the good acting, Megan Lawless doesn't have as big a role as Nikki, but she's completely believable. Cooper Tomlinson was the weakest of the four leads, but I think a lot of that was because he was just playing a bro.

This movie has flaws. There are things Nikki does that make zero sense. There's obsession and there's just being psycho. I think they lose that line pretty significantly at one point, but it doesn't hurt the film too much.

Recommended.

I was waiting for your opinion.

Truthfully, it could have been even better, but I really like taking the monkey paw concept, focusing on one wish, and amping it up.

I think we're in a renaissance of sorts in the horror genre. Barbarian, Weapons, and this have returned horror to its basic formula.

I do see some people are trying to dive into deeper meanings of this movie. They're saying it's about men and women and blah blah blah. I've seen "modern men's insecurities", "how men control women's bodies", and other nonsense. You know who doesn't say that? The filmmakers. In fact, one funny tidbit of those opinions is they seem to not know the ending was completely different. The one we got was, in the filmmaker's own words, a one off they did for fun and the crew thought it was perfect so they kept it.

Sometimes we need to just enjoy the art and stop looking for deeper meaning.

It was like a $1 million budget, right? Seems to be getting a lot of buzz for such a small movie

Blumhouse is distributing it, so low budget or not, there's power behind the film.

It's deserved. Like I said, it's flawed, but a very entertaining movie.