No spoilers.
I noticed Violent Night lately. TLDR: Santa is visiting a mansion to drop off presents however the mansion is being robbed by mercenaries. Sounds superior, proper? It’s even rated effectively on IMDB at 6.9. If you use IMDB so much to save your self from crappy movies, something 7 and above is nearly all the time a very good guess. So think about my hype.
But what I watched… wasn’t what I imagined. It’s an okay film. It’s not unhealthy. But I couldn’t perceive why I didn’t prefer it that a lot. The jokes fell flat. Too many sappy Hallmark moments. It went on too lengthy at 2 hours. But nonetheless an honest watch.
Days later, I watched The Banshees of Inisherin. TLDR: two Irish greatest buddies on an island break up and issues escalate worse and worse. Sounds kinda lame, proper? Even boring. But it’s a darkish comedy with absurd moments. And I loved this far more than Violent Night.
But why? Banshees of Inisherin took itself seriously the whole time, regardless of how absurd the second was. Violent Night fell into the extraordinarily widespread entice of making an attempt to be campy. It knew it was campy so it didn’t hassle making an attempt to flip itself from an honest movie to an awesome movie.
I feel when writers make a foolish premise, it’s very, very, very simple to fall into the “Oh ha ha, this story is so dumb, let’s just play it up” and brush off any legitimate criticism with “But it’s a campy silly movie”.
I convey one other instance of a film premise that’s absurd however seriously taken: It Follows. TLDR: a curse is handed on by intercourse and whoever is cursed is ultimately killed by a stalking ghost. Even the author mentioned he had a tough time explaining the premise and simply didn’t hassle. It Follows is one in all my favourite horror movies.
What was your elevator pitch for this? Ever since I first noticed it, I’ve been making an attempt to describe it to individuals and I haven’t discovered a manner that does it justice.
MITCHELL: There wasn’t one and the purpose is as a result of any elevator pitch for this may be simply horrible. I actually prevented speaking about the film to individuals. The manner that we bought individuals on board the movie was actually, we despatched the script and I did a very nice lookbook for the movie that sort of walked by the feeling of the movie. I feel it took most likely each these issues to persuade individuals. But no. Personally, I couldn’t pitch this to anyone. And when individuals would ask me what I used to be doing, I’d be like, ‘It’s a horror movie.’ ‘What is it about?’ ‘You’ll simply have to see it.’ I actually didn’t need to clarify it as a result of it’s actually powerful to clarify with out it simply sounding actually ridiculous.
So cease hiding behind irony and camp. Take your premise seriously. This isn’t to say there is no such thing as a room for meta campy tales. John Leguizamo’s hammy villain in Violent Night was nice. But you cannot have all ham. IMO, it is really more durable to steadiness being meta and campy than it’s to really take your foolish premise seriously, sarcastically.
What do you guys suppose? How legitimate is this concept?
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