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Seattle Was a Riot

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Heart Eyes

by Hope Madden

There is an undeniable goofy sweetness to Josh Ruben’s horror films, no matter the body count or blood flow or number of people with holes so big in their throats that you can see the characters behind them.

Heart Eyes is the latest from the Werewolves Within and Scare Me director. The new film, fit for the holiday, trails a serial killer slicing and dicing through couples every Valentine’s Day. It’s Year 3, and the marauder has moved from Boston to Philly to set up shop for this year’s gore soaked romance in Seattle.

Just as Ally (Olivia Holt)—still stinging from how quickly her ex moved on after their breakup—has to work with advertising fixer Jay (Mason Gooding) to right the marketing campaign she seems to have tanked beyond repair.

But when the Heart Eyes Killer mistakes the colleagues for lovebirds, a cross-city chase begins.

The script penned by Phillip Murphy (Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard), along with Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day 2 U) and Michael Kennedy (Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife), trots out rom com tropes as often as machetes. From meet cute to grand gesture at the airport to a string of classic romcom titles worked into dialog, Heart Eyes wears its influences on its sleeve.

The glossy “the city is its own character” filming, the amiable chemistry between Holt and Gooding, and their unreasonable good looks center the romance, but Ruben does not go light on the gore. Nor is he skimpy with comedy, although he can’t seem to settle on a tone for the humor. He veers from witty to broadly comedic to gallows and back, leaving the film feeling slightly haphazard.

Heart Eyes is also drawn out a bit too long. The finale, though plenty bloody, feels more forced than satisfying. But it’s a fun, gory, sweetly romantic waste of time, just like Valentine’s Day.

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TGIF

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Freaky

by Hope Madden

Nobody has more fun with the slasher genre than writer/director Christopher Landon. (Well, maybe his writing partner Michael Kennedy.)

Three years ago, the duo created a time loop to allow one victim to return from the dead again and again and again and again until she stopped the marauder. Happy Death Day was so much more fun than it had any right to be, thanks, in part, to a giddy appreciation of the genre and some great casting.

Landon and Kennedy are at it again, and this time the premise and casting might be even better.

What if Freaky Friday met Friday the 13th?

That’s gold right there.

Freaky is as upbeat and lesson-filled as any Disney coming-of-age film, and its body count is as high and as messy as anything in the Voorhees universe. It’s a bloody riot, and Vince Vaughn hasn’t been this much fun since Old School.

Vaughn plays the Blissfield Butcher—at least for a while. But the boogeyman who haunts Blissfield teens right around Homecoming each year steals a cool looking dagger while dispatching nubile youth at an art collector’s house. When he uses the weapon on Millie (Kathryn Newton, Blockers), their souls magically reassign. The evil menace wakes up inside the body of a 5’5” high schooler while Millie wakes up looking like Vince Vaughn.

Oh, the hijinks.

Part of the subversive fun is watching Landon and Kennedy’s wish fulfilment, as the now-evil high schooler dispatches bully teachers, catty bitches and would-be gang rapist jocks. But most of the joy is in watching Vaughn.

He doesn’t overdo it, either. His gestures aren’t wildly feminine—he never feels like a caricature of a high school girl. It’s still funny, but the humor is far less built on a man playing a girl as it is on a petite female inhabiting the body of a really enormous man. That’s mainly the terrain Vaughn and Landon mine for physical comedy, and it is fertile ground.

And the fact that Vaughn so believably conjures the heart of a teenage girl makes any number of scenes—especially the romantic ones—delightfully sweet and tender.

And also, a lot of people die. This is not a PG-13 comedy. But it is a hoot.