For months before this film was released there was crazy-good buzz coming off of it. Entertainment Weekly repeatedly wrote articles saying “Here comes your next horror obsession” or “Is ‘You’re Next’ the Next Big Horror Hit?” Well, the film opened well below expectations last weekend and there was exactly one other person in the theater when I watched it this weekend, so I’m guessing it’s not the next big thing. Having actually watched the movie, I kept waiting for whatever innovative part was supposed to show up and replace the rather generic slasher-house movie I was watching, but it never really did.
What Works: The film is about three masked murderers who terrorize a family (two parents, four adult children, and their four spouses/partners) during a weekend get together. It’s pretty standard stuff for the genre, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t genuinely suspenseful sequences like the first time one of the people goes to the neighbor’s house for help. Also one of the sons has a girlfriend, an Australian who is especially good at fighting back. Gradually, she becomes the only one we care about in the movie.
What Doesn’t Work: The first twenty or so minutes are used to set-up the main characters and get us to care about them and the toxic familial dynamics between them, but that’s pretty much abandoned when the sharp objects start flying. Then the characters seem like they’re hardly related and don’t react with enough shock whenever someone they’ve known their entire lives is murdered right before them. Plus, the “twists” are easy to spot if you’re awake and have ever seen a movie before. [Gee, would you think that one of the characters is in on the carnage?] I even figured a couple of them out just from the trailer. When the motives of the killers are revealed, you wonder why they’re going to such brutal and elaborate lengths. At the end of the movie, I just kept wondering what made this thing special or worthy of such buzz.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Don’t evaporate the family dynamic the second you want to get to the killing. Don’t wrack up such a high body count in the first half. Don’t have the second half go on for as long as it does, because it becomes repetitive. Make some effort to explain why the mastermind would go about such an elaborate and gruesome way towards their goal. [Three killers couldn’t just storm the house with guns? It has to be machetes and hiding around stretching it out for hours?] And make the film funnier.