Gerald's Reindeer Games

 

Hey, hey, Horror Nuts!  Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

So, I just want to take a second to express my mild dislike for a certain type of movie and it directly stems from the fact that I hate snow.

It's winter. Movies that take place in the wintertime are already behind the eightball for me. I get cold just watching them. And I don't like being cold.



It's just a mild dislike, but it gets worse when it's a horror movie because, well, not only are you running from murderers and zombies and ice vampires, but you're also freezing your ass off!  So, whenever I run into a movie like that, I already know, this filmmaker better bring the scares because I'm already in a pissy mood at the opening credits.

Which brings us to This Week's Movie!

Till Death starring Megan Fox, Eoin Macken, Callan Mulvey, Jack Roth, and Aml Ameen.

Let me open this by saying, fundamentally speaking, I don't have any kind of beef with Megan Fox as I know a lot of people do for some reason. She was in one of my favorite horror movies Jennifer's Body - a movie that, on paper, I should have hated, and yet, I dug a lot, largely because she did a pretty good job in it.

This movie, however...

Let me set this up for you.

Fox plays Emma, a woman married to a lawyer Mark(Macken) who, at the beginning of the film, you get the vibe that he's got kind of a creepy Christian Grey thing happening with her. She also looks perpetually miserable throughout the entire film. Like, this is her face all the time:

Naturally, being the unhappy wife of a rich dude, she's of course cheating on him with Tom (Ameel). But those of you on the moral police, worry not! She breaks it off with him because today is her anniversary.

Hubby Mark takes her out to a fancy dinner, then drives her to their lake house where after doing the whole rose petal thing and photos of their wedding hanging in a dark room (not sure why there's a darkroom? There's no indication that either of them are photographers) he romances her and they make mad passionate love.

The next morning, she wakes up to find her husband has handcuffed himself to her. Slightly freaked out, she's like, "Um, what the hell?" and he's like, "Hold that thought." Then he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head...

...leaving her to drag his body all over the house trying to get free.

Pretty fucked up, right?

While she's schlepping around the house with a corpse attached to her wrist, Tom shows up like, "You called?" And she's like, "Nope. Must have been Mark. You should probably not be here."  And she says this to him because at this point she's figured out two pretty important things about this situation:

A) Mark knew about her affair.
B) Mark wants her to die.

Enter generic bad guys Bobby Ray(Mulvey) and Jimmy(Roth). See, Bobby Ray attacked her at some point off-camera and now he's back for revenge. But it was her husband who put him away, so, clearly, he's been hired to do the dirty work of murdering both his wife and her lover.

Which means, sadly, Tom falls victim to the black guy dies first trope...kind of? I mean, if you don't count Mark.

Aaaanyway, the rest of the movie is just Emma trying not to get killed by the guy who tried to kill her before, which, admittedly, is fairly action-packed and suspenseful and all that. It's not a bad movie per se...except...

Well, I'm clearly too much of a pedantic asshole for this movie because there were so many truck-sized plot holes and Deus Ex Machina events that it was really hard for me to suspend my belief. 

For instance:

1) What's the story behind Emma's attack?

Y'all, I wasn't expecting a fully detailed storyline here. But I was expecting something. All we know is that she was attacked. We don't really know if she was mugged or raped or just attacked for fun. I could have let that information slide if it didn't come up as Bobby Ray's prime motivation for even being there.

Like, Mark set the whole thing up by telling him, "There be diamonds", but when things start to go really south and it's clear that they should just cut their losses and run, Bobby Ray's all about "finishing the job" and murdering Emma because she half-blinded him and called the cops on him and...

Look, I'm not saying that criminals aren't motivated towards revenge...but most of them aren't quite THAT motivated unless there's a story behind it and we don't really get a whole lot. And what we DO get, we sort of get after the fact in a rushed dialogue between him and Jimmy.

I'm just saying just a five-second thing about how he was a serial killer or something would have sewn that particular hole up. 

 

2) Knife Fight

At a certain point, rich wife Emma gets hold of a knife and attacks Bobby Ray like she's part of the Deadly Assassination Squad from Kill Bill. To the filmmaker's credit, she gets her ass handed to her, but still, are we supposed to believe she's ever used a knife to do...well...anything before now? 

3) Why is Tom there?

So, Tom shows up presumably because Emma texted him. First of all, Tom is just the booty call, how did he know where the Lakehouse was in the first place?

And assuming that was all in the text, why didn't he call first? Or call the cops? Or, like, anything other than driving all the way out to the middle of nowhere in the frickin' snow based on an "I'm in trouble" text. 

I'm saying, a lot can be inferred that might motivate her boo thing to come all the way out in the snow to check up on her, but there's no explanation or even any real surprise when he shows up. In fact, when Emma sees him her first knee-jerk reaction is not "OMGCALLTHEPOLICEHURRY!" which in it of itself is weird since she's handcuffed to her dead husband.

4) Mark thought of everything...except the ax in the boathouse

Okay, so while Emma is dragging her husband around by the wrist all over the house, she discovers that Mark took the time to painstakingly make it so she'd be trapped. He drains the car of gas, he gets rid of all the tools that might help her free herself, he breaks her cell phone, he even sets up the darkroom to show incriminating photos of her after she was beaten up and when she was hanging with Tom.

Yet, there is very conveniently an ax in the boathouse with which she uses to chop off Mark's hand to squeeze out of the handcuffs.

The guy who planned this whole thing out down to the most minute detail forgot to get rid of a whole ax. And no, we're not going to explain that either.

And those are just a few examples.  There's a lot of Why-would-they-do-that-oh-so-that-the-movie-can-happen kind of shenaniganry going on in this movie.  

And with that being said, I'd like to give it a jewel, but I think I'm going to give it one conditionally.

That is to say that this is a pretty decent flick so long as you don't think about anything that's happening.

So, next week! I've been putting this off, but I'm gonna tackle Blood Red Sky! See you next time!

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