There’s two kinds of horror movies. There’s the ones that start with “a kill” and the ones that don’t. This one does. That’s how you know it ain’t literature. That said, I really want to like this movie, not least because so many people do. And, it does have a few things going for it: really good early John Carpenter-like cinematography, a really good 70s analogue synth early John Carpenter-like score, and in Maika Monroe the most likable heroine since Jamie Lee Curtis. I get why people like it. However, it also lacks, er, just about anything else. The “plot” is as thin as it gets, thinner than “Final Destination” which was thinner than an onion skin. Basically, a curse is passed along where if you are a gorgeous teen who has sex with another gorgeous teen who is cursed, you get followed by a creature bent on killing you unless you have sex with someone else and put them ahead of you in line. The reason and origin of this curse are, apparently, for there to be a reason for the movie, because they also are never mentioned or questioned. You know you have the curse because you see random strangers walking towards you, whose identity is also never questioned or explained, but who are invisible to everyone else, although they can attack them physically. If the person you give it to doesn’t pass it along, the killer or demon or whatever it is kills them and then comes after you again, working it way back up the line—this is explained by the person who gave the heroine the curse, although how he knows this is, of course, never explained, as he’s not even positive who gave it to him, and never even got the name of the person he suspects it was. Again, the sole explanation seems to be, movie. Plenty of other fridge logic abounds, such as the ability to hurt a supernatural entity by shooting it with a gun or electrocuting it. And I’m sorry, but all the decent cinematography and admittedly expert early-John-Carpenter-style pacing in the world can’t sustain a movie through that kind of weak writing, now matter how much better it is than the fare the kiddies are used to seeing start with a “kill”.
