Rating: D
Dir: Michael Thordarson
Star: Mia Parco, Andrew Bursiaga, Frangene Andrews, Holly Conroy
Making a movie is hard. Making a movie with limited resources is harder. Making a movie with limited resources during the worst global pandemic in a century is even harder. Making a movie with limited resources during the worst global pandemic in a century, where your lead actress quits in the middle of filming is… Well, perhaps you need to listen to the universe at that point, and decide it was just not meant to be. Thordarson, however, is clearly made of sterner stuff. He soldiered on with this production, which he not only wrote, produced and directed, but is also credited as the director of photography, editor, production designer, casting director, ADR supervisor, fight choreographer, and wardrobe supervisor.
It’s therefore likely unsurprising the results are not very good. It would perhaps have helped had he picked a genre, or even a tone, and stuck with it. Instead, it can’t decide if it’s earnest or serious; a horror movie or a parody of horror movies. The trivia section of the IMDb states, “The screenplay was inspired by battle royale anime such as Magical Girl Raising Project.” Well, that is a twist. It does have a guy in a mask with an implausibly large pair of scissors, but I was not otherwise getting many anime vibes off this. For the scenario feels closer to Saw: Sophie (Parco) is kidnapped and dropped in the middle of a battle to the death between various bizarre, themed serial killers.
These are basically a series of one-note tropes, mostly because few of them get more than a couple of minutes of screen time, before being dispatched in disappointingly bloodless fashion. For example, there’s the CEO Killer, who has clearly spent too much time hanging out on /r/antiwork, or Drowning Lady (Conroy), who kills people that pollute the environment. There’s a Satanist, apparently straying in from an Insane Clown Posse concert. I was thinking this might end up tying in with Sophie’s housemate, Rikki, who is a wannabe death metal singer. It doesn’t. Those scenes could easily have been removed completely, and probably should have. Because this brings me to one of the film’s two major problems.
The print present on Tubi runs for two and three-quarter hours. Yes, you read that correctly. One hundred and sixty-five minutes. Nine thousand, eight hundred and ninety-one seconds, to be precise. Longer than The Godfather Part III, Pulp Fiction or Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. For Thordarson to make his feature debut of that duration shows a remarkable degree of self-confidence. Fortunately, the home setting meant I did not have to endure what would, in a theatrical environment, have been an ordeal more than a viewing experience. To get through this test of stamina, I ended up watching it in four separate chunks, over the period of about a week. I can’t imagine any other way, short of going full Clockwork Orange and being strapped to a chair with my eyes pried open.
Despite its marathon length, the only character to receive significant development outside of Sophie – and that’s largely limited to her repeatedly telling everyone she’s a psychology student – is the Princess of Calamity, also known as Rex (Bursiaga). He became a serial killer after his wife got murdered, which turned him into a man-hater. In order to lull them into a false sense of security, he took to dressing up as a woman, though Stevie Wonder is probably the only person who would be fooled by his disguise. So he’s a serial killer, who is pretending to be trans, although to quote Princess/Rex, “I kind of grew to like the fashion and shopping of it.” I have to imagine this bizarre depiction won’t exactly put Thordarson on the short-list for a GLAAD Media Award.
Rex has vowed not to hurt any women, so ends up teaming up with Sophie as they roam the otherwise deserted city. And, by “city”, I mean what looks for ninety percent of the time like a community college campus. The encounters with the other participants in the game are brief and forgettable – fight choreographer Thordarson should not give up his day job – and after each, someone pretending badly to be an AI announces the death of another killer. Spending five minutes, Googling “text to speech”, was too much effort, it appears. Eventually, it all comes down to Sophie against the one remaining killer, where the truth about the contest is revealed. This twist will likely not provoke the intended result, unless Thordarson was actively going for bemusement and baffled indifference.
I must, regrettably, discuss the second major problem. It’s a musical. Yes, virtually everyone bar Sophie bursts into song, for example, each killer getting a number to explain their motivations. The styles of these range widely, from pop to heavy metal (the Satanist, unsurprisingly), but are united by one common factor. They are all terrible, in both content and execution. The blame for this must be laid at the door of Thordarson, in two of his roles. Firstly, performing yet another job as lyricist, for which he has no clue: reciting bad dialogue in a sing-song fashion does not a ditty make. Secondly, as casting director. If you must make a musical – and it’s something I’d strongly discourage as your debut – you need actors who can carry a goddamn tune. Here, hardly anyone can. Minor pass to Andrews as the policewoman host, who is okay.
The results are pure, industrial strength cringe. At its best, the musical numbers reach the level of bad green-screen karaoke. At worst? Well, let me present you with some examples, verbatim, of the lyrics here. Lady Gaga couldn’t make these sound good.
- We can’t wait till you’re a corpse / We’ll clean the walls with your blood / We’ll decapitate your head and put it on a stick / Dead, dead!
- How do you define evil? / The churches are controlling your mind. / How do you define evil? / The CEOs are working you to death. / How do you define evil? / And the politicians are lying.
- Guys are mansplaining to me / About everyday life don’t they listen? / They are the prompt, to kill them is a mission. / La la la la la / Kill all men / La La
These are all from the first hour of the film, because after that I lost the will to live. According to the IMDb, “Sophie and the Serial Killers’ musical numbers are parodies of common metal tropes. The goal of the project was to combine metal-sounding lyrics with typical sounding musical numbers that you would find in Disney movies and such. Common metal lyric tropes are murder, worshiping Satan, being hateful, and being political (typically Left-wing).” I’m surprised I have to explain this, and am hardly “Left-wing”, but there’s a bit more to parody than simply being a shitty copy of the thing you want to parody. Thordarson desperately needs to watch Spinal Tap, repeatedly, and see how it’s done.
It brings me no pleasure to tear apart something, into which people have clearly put a lot of time and effort. Once it hits Tubi, however, it’s fair game. I will say, Thordarson has made a movie, and that deserves praise. I know, first-hand, it ain’t easy. But the missteps here are many and obvious. Edited down to half the length – starting off by removing every single song – this would be merely a cheap Battle Royale imitation. However, it would be something easily forgotten and quickly discarded, rather than being a low-budget monument to the follies of one-man movie-making. He’d have been better off donating the $25,000 budget to charity.