Amusing at times, but too mean-spirited

Rating: 4/10 (18 January 2020)

Although I appreciated some of the in-jokes, something about this movie rubbed me the wrong way while watching it, and it was only after I finished it that I figured it out: the movie seems to hold the whole horror genre in contempt. As opposed to the somewhat similar Scream, which at least seemed to be enjoying itself in its deconstruction of the slasher genre, this one seemed to be sneering down at horror, thinking itself to be above it all. Needless to say, I don't especially enjoy being lectured on why horror is bad (apparently because it has its cliches, conveniently overlooking the facts that a: not all horror movies use these cliches, and b: every other genre has plenty of cliches as well). The argument is harmed by the somewhat careless mixture of cliches from two very different eras of horror, with the film seemingly trying to simultaneously deconstruct 80s slasher movies and 2000s torture movies, both of which have mostly separate sets of cliches; but with a set-up seemingly derived from The Evil Dead, which doesn't even belong to either sub-genre. I'm no fan of torture movies (I find them repetitive and not very scary), but I do believe that in order to parody something, one must first understand it, otherwise you end up with something closer to the Scary Movie franchise than any real satire. Also, the mediocre CGI effects and drab set design couldn't really hold my attention, which is something of a turn-off for me. This may be deliberate (a lot of horror movies released after 2000 or so tend to have an unappealing dull brown color scheme, and the effects might be parodying the comparably ugly effects found in scifi channel movies), but something gives me the feeling that it wasn't. I get that most horror from around the time this came out was pretty mediocre, but the problem is that this merely criticizes the obvious, rather than offering any new ideas about how to do it better.