steve-s-2001

"Skillhouse" begins with Carter Swick and his sister Lauren filming a video for a social media platform called "Triller." They are attacked and it is a media sensation, but three months later the attacker is back and this time he has kidnapped ten people for his "Social Media Game"...

"Skillhouse" is another in a long line of "Psycho kidnaps influencers and makes them compete for "Likes" for their lives" movies. All the typical tropes are here -- incredibly annoying characters that we hate from the get-go, a psycho who can somehow control time and space, long rambling speeches about "This is not real life" and "Is this what you want to see", thousands of people watching without calling the police, "rules" that change on a whim, etc, etc... And I'm not sure the writer really "gets" social media, if you watch the movie you will definitely say, "No way in real life that person got the "least views" of that entire group."

On the plus side, though, the body count is impressive with some gruesome kills, and only a couple of shoddy CGI effects to hurt the set pieces. Overall, there's nothing really new in "Skillhouse" and there are plenty of better "Influencer Kidnapped" movies out there, but it moves along pretty quickly. Nothing original or special, just sort of "OK."

I think they're trying to cram too much into each episode. "Criminal Minds" has always leaned into the "hacker trope"... you know, "Garcia, get me a list of all men taller than 6 feet who worked in a store that sold sneakers and who had a mother who had red hair and worked in a diner" sort of thing, but it's getting even more absurd. This week was a great example, it just made no sense. The Unsub had no pattern (he committed one crime and then was planning on doing something quite different) but they were immediately able to identify him, because... "computers?"

The overall drama with Voit is really good, but they either need to pull back on the non-unsub stuff (for example, Tara's relationship, which was painful this week) or maybe expand each episode to 90 minutes to give it some time?

"Mauler" begin as so many good slashers do. Many years ago a young boy is involved in a traumatic event that ends up with his parents dead, and he is adopted by his religious grandmother. Flash forward to today, and a group of 20-somethings decide to try an "internet dare" where they spend the night in an abandoned house where something horrible happened in the past. Unfortunately, they choose this house and, despite what they think, the house is not abandoned...

"Mauler" is so disappointing. It started out great, making me think we were going to get a nice, retro slasher. Flashback with backstory of killer? Check. Group of attractive and incredibly annoying 20-somethings? Check. The group make stupid decisions? Check. Now, all that's left should be the easy part -- have your hulking villain dispatch each of the annoying kids in a gruesome fashion one by one until only the final girl remains.

But after the setup, "Mauler" just falls apart. The tone is all wrong -- it will go slasher and then try comedy that is painful to watch. We keep waiting for the slashing and it just never seems to come. We get the gang arguing about an absolutely idiotic plan, we get "comedy relief" policemen, and it's all wrong. It doesn't start to hit a groove until about 10 minutes before the end and even then, there's an out of the blue ending that will leave you shaking your head.

It is sad to see a low budget horror flick that started out to promising just not be able to deliver. I mean, it's not awful -- you could definitely do worse -- but I think the fact that it started out so promising makes it just seem so disappointing and hard to recommend.