Tag Archives: Blu Hunt

Rizz Up

The Dead Thing

by Hope Madden

The clever, underlying theme in Shaun of the Dead is that every Londoner was already basically a zombie.

Elric Kane, co-writer and director of The Dead Thing, looks at a culture of app hook ups and sterile, fluorescent work spaces and sees something similar. A whole generation of people seems to already be dead.

They’re not exactly alive, anyway.

Beautiful Alex (Blu Hunt) fits that bill. Her job is mindless, she keeps her headphones in and avoids eye contact with her one co-worker, Mark (Joey Millin). After work and another swipe right hookup she sneaks into her apartment to avoid conversation with her longtime best friend (Katherine Hughes). Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.

Then she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), and it’s as if she wakes from a trance. It starts off the same as every other meet up, but Kyle is different. They connect. He stays all night, they laugh and draw pictures of each other and hate to say goodbye the next day when her uber for work arrives.

She decides to keep in touch, but he never responds to a text. So, she shows up where he works, and a mystery begins.

Each act in The Dead Thing tells a different story. Hunt anchors the evolving storytelling with an authentic display of ennui, of disconnectedness—partly chosen, partly inevitable. Smith-Petersen’s vacant sweetness gives each change in the narrative an underlying sinister quality that also evolves nicely from one act to the next.

By Act 3, Kane abandons the film’s original metaphor in favor of a different analogy. While this change offers more opportunity for visceral horror, the result is less satisfying than the original, insightful image of modern romance.

Though the more traditional wrap up disappoints after such a stylish and intriguing premise, The Dead Thing—including Iona Vasile’s dreamy camerawork and deceptively creepy performances throughout—keeps your attention and manages to subvert expectations and entertain.

The Kids Are Not All Right

The New Mutants

by Hope Madden

Let’s be honest. Logan’s dead, JLaw’s past her contract obligations, Dark Phoenix bombed and the X-Men are in need of some new blood and maybe a new direction.

The franchise does make a big of a zig with its latest offshoot. The New Mutants is essentially a YA horror film. Co-writer/director Josh Boone’s premise may be comic book, but his execution is angst and PG-13 scares.

Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up to find herself in a locked-down, mainly vacant, definitely old and unmistakably spooky asylum of some sort. Here Dani will learn to control her power—whatever that might be—with the help of the sole custodian of Dani and four other special youngsters, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).

Focusing exclusively on adolescence allows the film to deliver, undiluted, the main concepts of the franchise: embrace your differences, forgive yourself, accept others for what they are, master your own potential and stick it to the man. Fine ideas, every one of them, and certainly common themes in YA.

As our plucky hero, Hunt struggles to find anything close to authenticity in her dreamy dialog, but the balance of the cast is strong.

The always remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy relishes the wicked girl role while Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams (battling Taylor-Joy for largest eyes in a human face) is a deeply empathetic, awkward girl with a crush.

That the crush is not on one of the two boys in lockdown—played by Charlie Heaton and Henry Zaga—is a refreshing change of pace charmingly underscored by the teens’ apparent fixation with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Boone, whose 2014 effort The Fault In Our Stars defines angst porn, knows YA. His combination of these two genres is a bit of a misfire, though, particularly when the final, big, giant scare is revealed. Yikes—and I don’t mean that in a good way.

New Mutants is a film trying too hard to cash in on proven youth market formulas, but the concoction fizzles. It doesn’t really work as an angsty romance, misses the mark as a horror movie and never for a minute feels like a superhero flick.