Review: Freaky

Teenager Millie (Kathryn Newton) is set upon by a serial killer known as The Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), and stabbed with a ritual knife called La Dola. He grabbed it during his previous slashing. Millie survives the stabbing, unfortunately the knife has powers that result in her swapping bodies with The Butcher! Katie Finneran is Millie’s loving (but somewhat smothering) mother, Alan Ruck plays a bullying woodwork teacher who loathes Millie.

 

A body-swap horror film isn’t an inherently bad idea. In fact, my favourite 80s horror film “Child’s Play” is essentially a body-swap horror film (Wes Craven used it in a couple of films too like “Shocker”). Unfortunately, once again director/co-writer Christopher Landon has taken a workable idea and done the least interesting thing with it (previously he made the “Groundhog Day” horror-comedy “Happy Death Day” and its equally unimaginative sequel). Basically, this is “Freaky Friday” Blumhouse-style, a mostly unsurprising horror-comedy with far too much emphasis on the snarky teen comedy nonsense. More emphasis on the horror side of things might’ve produced far more interesting and twisted results. Instead, the filmmakers think merely taking the body swap idea and adding some blood to it is clever enough. No, all it means is you’re making a snarky 90s horror film but with some added blood (90s horror was mostly pretty bloodless). Thus, Landon and co-writer Michael Kennedy (whose background is mostly IT and animation for the mostly dreadful “Family Guy” and “American Dad”) end up wasting the talents of leads Kathryn Newton and Vince Vaughn by giving them only the obvious places to go with their characters.

 

On the plus side, the film is surprisingly gory at times, and I didn’t expect that at all. Unfortunately, that’s about the only surprise you’ll find here, including the usual ‘jump scare’ bullshit idea of what ‘horror’ actually is, and largely the same post-“Scream” meta ‘cleverness’ that is no longer anywhere near clever. Seriously, “Scream” came out in the mid to late 90s…I was still a teenager. I’m 41 years old for fuck’s sake, take the horror genre somewhere new! The filmmakers have a potentially interesting and genuinely creepy concept to play with here, and they don’t utilise it in a creepy or interesting way (I would’ve made Newton and Vaughn father and daughter for one thing).

 

Kathryn Newton is a star in the making as far as I’m concerned. Whatever ‘it’ is, she has it. A lot of it, actually. Sadly, on this particular occasion she’s playing a semi-parody of a stereotype. Her character’s best friends are a black girl and gay guy for crying out loud. Been there, done that. Seriously, did I travel back in time to 1996 without my knowledge? Newton is absolutely terrific with what she’s been given, and is still the best thing here. It’s just not an especially interesting use of her talents. I’m sorry, but all the violence and gore in the world can’t do a damn thing to liven up a stale, safe Happy Meal of a horror-comedy. In fact, I kinda wished there was no comedy here at all. Partly because the comedy isn’t funny anyway. However, I actually think a straight body-swap horror film, whilst not original, would’ve been a fair bit fresher than what we get here. I guess for that we’d need filmmakers raised on 70s and 80s horror, not 1995-2001’s poor excuse for horror. So instead of going somewhere genuinely creepy and horrific with the concept, we get scenes of Newton inhabited by Vaughn’s personality eating and drinking messily. He’s a serial killer, not a fat slob! Sorry, but stuff like that and a couple of “Friday the 13^th” (not my favourite 80s horror series) references ain’t gonna cut it for me.

 

Another issue I had is that I overall just don’t think the filmmakers have figured out how to use the body-swap aspect in a full-length film. The actual body swap aspect doesn’t kick in until 20+ minutes into a 90 minute film, so there’s not enough time devoted to the body-swap hijinks. That said, we know next to nothing about Vaughn’s psycho killer character before the swap, so in some ways I wish we’d had more time before the swap because it ends up rendering the body-swap aspect rather useless. How can we care about the swap if we don’t spend enough time with the characters to understand them before the swap? So obviously the film needed to be longer, but who wants to watch a 2+ hour version of this? Vaughn really only gets to play the ‘girl’ and he’s quite enjoyable in that role, but it’s the least interesting, most routine aspect of the swap in my opinion. The best performance comes from stage and TV veteran Katie Finneran, as the mother. You might remember her as the nauseatingly-voiced Poppy on two episodes of the genuinely clever and witty “Frasier”.

 

I liked that the filmmakers were willing to off quite important characters, but I’d like it a lot more if the people were interesting or likeable enough to care about their fate. For the most part, the characters are either dull or horrible. In theory I liked that they made Alan Ruck’s a-hole teacher character completely awful and irredeemable. However, with a moment’s thought you realise it’s only because the filmmakers don’t have the balls to show Newton’s character performing violent acts on anyone unless they thoroughly deserve it. It’s blatantly obvious that it’s really Vaughn controlling her actions, it’s just Newton’s body being used to carry out the carnage. A 10 year-old could figure that out. For crying out loud, make Ruck’s character a decent person and have the same thing happen, and it’d be a lot more compelling. It’s OK for the audience to hate a serial killer, even if their outer vessel is that of a teenage girl. Why have such gory deaths when you’re otherwise offering up the most safe, unimaginative PG-13 product possible?

 

A potentially intriguing idea is mishandled, leaving talented actors to do fairly predictable, clichéd things. Ho-hum, this one’s only marginally better than Landon’s “Happy Death Day” films. I don’t think he’s an especially clever writer.

 

Rating: C-