It has premiered in Movistar + ‘Vicious Fun’, a modest horror comedy about a horror film critic that ends in a kind of gathering of ‘anonymous serial killers’ that turns one day of its protagonist into a slasher full of neon light, electronic music, and black humor spilled with gallons of blood.
Genre film festivals are places for meeting, celebrating and connecting with fans of the same type of cinema, and sometimes, screenings are places where it does not matter which film passes by as long as it has enough blood, gags and penchant for fun. The late-night passes have room for great horror comedies like ‘Tucker & Dale against evil’ (Tucker & Dale vs Evil, 2010) and for attempts like ‘Vicious fun‘.
Derivative and endogamous humor
In both films the audience will react with laughter and screams, but at home it is something else and products that are deliberately prepared to make a room react can backfire when the intentions are too visible. ‘Vicious Fun’ relies on one of the worst possible tropes in a horror comedy, starring an expert in horror movies 80’s in love with his partner who ends up involved with a group of serial killers.
It is set in 1983 but it does not seem too much, and it only remains as an excuse to play Carpenter-style synth music and plague the neon lights screen, an aesthetic vaporwave very out of date that seems to be covering a check list of everything that it is supposed to complete to be an artifact homage to the cinema of that time. From the presentation of Joel, an interview not too funny or authentic, we find an unfriendly character who seems a mockery of lovers of the slasher.
He wants to repeat the clichés of horror movies by verbalizing through Joel, and supposedly ridiculing them, but as soon as the movie becomes a succession of murders in the middle of a chase It doesn’t take long to deliver everything he’s tried to deconstruct, with a mix of humor and blood that just can’t find a proper balance, being functional in his unbridled gore but failing alarmingly in comedy.
Go clever
There are signs for airplane landing to warn us when a joke arrives, and the reactions of their own characters are completely out of place, as if the script by James Villeneuve did not have enough indications for the director Cody Calahan who is not able to shine. to the idea, a priori funny, that a group of serial killers have their own self-help meetings to share experiences, tips on cleaning up after your murders, and generally improving yourself as homicidal maniacs.
In the last third stupidity weighs twice over wit, we went from a desperate attempt to make an “incisive” reading of the springs of the genre to a crude physical humor with several gags without effect, and while it rains blood and special effects that we already do not care if they are well done or not. At the gates of a new ‘Scream’, it is convenient to review the original by Wes Craven 25 years later, to see that we have not managed to advance too much in satires of the genre.
There is nothing worse than looking for a festival and staying at the gates. ‘Vicious Fun’ seems desperate to do something really fun, but the funny thing never quite falls on its feet. You can kill a villain with a human gut, but the cartoonish approach needs to improve the improvisation, its crude editing, and excess verbiage of the protagonist to hold its ground. There’s also no great need for an inconsequential horror-comedy movie to be anything more than what it is, but examples like this show how difficult it is to get to mix them without falling into the trap of underestimating both genres. And your audience.