If You Fart You're Dead

Rating: 6/10 (25 April 2018)

John Krasinski takes after Jordan Peele as a successful comedic actor turned serious director. He shows some skill here with "A Quiet Place," but, like Peele, I can't help but feel a little disappointed with his work given the high praise from critics and the commercial success. "A Quiet Place" showcases a truly brilliant concept, some effective moments of tension and emotion, but undercuts it with some serious bs writing, a dumb ending, and lack of true terror.
A lot can be said about the concept of "A Quiet Place." When I first heard of this movie I was immediately sold. The concept is very original and quite brilliant: monsters that hunt by sound. One small noise could mean your end. "A Quiet Place" delivers on some serious tense moments and even a few emotional shockwaves. The story is never boring and director John Krasinski is able to hold the audiences' attention throughout the short runtime, even more impressively done without the aid of dialogue. The performances were all believable and everyone did a good job acting scared s**tless. However, some of the writing was shoddy.
*Spoilers* There are many moments when the monsters should have killed members of the family. When Emily Blunt gives birth without medical assistance while making no sounds at all (even from the freakin' newborn baby) as a monster is literally 10 feet from her is ridiculous and laughably bad. Better yet, she should have died when she was in the water bound basement with the monster swimming beneath her. There were five different times the kids should have died but the monsters were probably too lazy or dumb to kill them (the barn, the truck, the cornfield). Why did that idiot five-year-old not understand you can't make sounds? This is even dumber given he died on Day 89, meaning this idiot survived that long. BS! And worst of all the monsters' weakness was dumber than the aliens from "Signs" (but I actually liked "Signs"). All they had to do was play a queef frequency on a girl's hearing aid and then shotgun the monsters in the head. Wow, funny how no one else figured that out. I called bs on so many things I couldn't get as emotionally involved as I wanted too nor could I suspend my disbelief for proper enjoyment.
"A Quiet Place" delivered on what the trailer promised minus actual horror or any real intelligence. Never during the film's runtime did I actually feel scared, I did jump, but good horror movies should scare you, not make you just jump. Though most movies nowadays don't scare people, especially people who are old cynical a**holes like me. Post Apocalyptic creature features don't scare me but some can gross me out like the hugely underrated "The Mist." I tend to soil myself over ghostly haunted house movies because now that is scary. In short, "A Quiet Place" is a great idea, but disappointingly executed. If you want to make a good horror movie, it first needs to be intelligently thought out, then the scares will follow, maybe.