Gavin Watches a Lot of Movies

[GavinMcWario]

Surprise, bitches! New movie review time, and this one hasn't even come out in theaters yet! Long story short, AMC sometimes does something called a Scream Unseen - a special one-night-only discounted showing of a horror movie ahead of its full theatrical release, with the minor catch that they keep the movie a secret until it starts. As someone who loves watching both good and bad horror movies in equal measure (extreme outliers like Skillhouse obviously excepted), I've been dying to catch one of these for a while, but this is the first time I've been able to squeeze one into my schedule. So, the question is, did I luck out or not?

Bone Lake

Bone Lake is one of those rare films I've been lucky enough to go into with absolutely no prior knowledge - including, as mentioned, the fact that I was going to be watching Bone Lake tonight. As such, my first thoughts as the movie began were "god I hope this isn't The Black Phone 2, I still haven't gotten around to watching the original and I really don't want the whole movie ruined for me because I accidentally signed up to watch the sequel first".

My second thoughts were "oh, so that's what it looks like when a crossbow bolt goes through a scrotum," followed very shortly thereafter by my third thoughts of "AAAAAAAAOOOOEEERRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!"

Once the... vivid opening sequence concludes, we're introduced to our rather stereotypical horror movie main couple, struggling writer Diego and supportive girlfriend Sage, as they attempt to spice up their rocky relationship by renting a mansion near the titular Bone Lake for a weekend getaway - presumably, the equally romantic waterside destinations of Homicide Falls, Cape Disembowlment, and You-Are-Definitely-Getting-Knife-Murdered-Here Springs were all fully booked this time of year. Jokes aside, it seems Bone Lake is a more popular spot for lovers than one might assume, as Diego and Sage's christening of their vacation home is unexpectedly interrupted by Will and Cin, another couple who were apparently double-booked for the same weekend by the mansion's owner. Despite the awkward circumstances, the couples happily agree to simply share the mansion between themselves for the weekend - but while things start off amicable, Will and Cin's behavior soon takes a turn for the manipulative, dragging Diego and Sage into a perverse game of mistrust and seduction.

Now, if you're like me and you saw a certain obnoxiously-overadvertised Blumhouse movie last year, you might be picking up some awfully familiar plot beats right now - and indeed, that's a large part of why I had such a hard time getting into Bone Lake. A troubled couple makes fast friends with a much more confident and outgoing couple, they're persuaded to share a home with them on a brief vacation, their relationship becomes steadily more uncomfortable as their new friends deliberately push the boundaries of their comfort zone more and more as part of a sadistic game, culminating in the other couple revealing themselves to be serial killers and chasing the protagonists around their home in a bloody action-packed finale? From beginning to end, the whole thing feels like a cheap, shallow Americanized knock-off of Speak No Evil - an especially damning comparison when you consider that Speak No Evil was already a cheap, shallow Americanized knock-off of Speak No Evil.

The movie does, at least, start to come into its own in the third act, albeit in a way that still feels clumsy and jarring. After an hour of maintaining a mostly serious and suspenseful tone, slowly building tension as Will and Cin weaponize Diego and Sage's darkest secrets and insecurities against them, driving a wedge ever deeper between the couple, the final half hour suddenly turns into a campy, ridiculous horror comedy. The villains drop about a hundred IQ points, bumbling around and mugging for the camera like they've been abruptly recast as Stu Macher and Billy Loomis, while the heroes put in their quota of knocking down the killer and then running away until the movie finally decides it's time for a spectacularly gory and over-the-top finisher. Is it extremely stupid and wildly incongruous with everything that came before it? Yes, obviously. Is it by far the most enjoyable part of the movie? Hell fucking yeah it is.

In the end, while I don't think I can give Bone Lake a good score, I find myself harkening back to my thoughts on Him from my last review: even if you don't enjoy it, you'll sure as hell remember it. For all that it's a shallow imitation of an already agressively-okay remake, Bone Lake does at least show a spark of something at the very end, and maybe that spark might be enough for some people to warrant sitting through everything beforehand... but let's be real, if you want to watch a horror movie this year that pivots between serious psychological horror and bonkers uber-violent horror-comedy, Weapons is right there.

5/10, upgraded to 6/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

 

[GavinMcWario]

And now for something completely different: a horror movie where I'm almost as scared of the main character as I am of the monster!

Good Boy (2025)

Probably unnecessary to add the year on this one, but I am aware of another unrelated horror movie from 2022 with the same name but a very different premise, so figured I might as well just to be safe.

Conceptually, Good Boy reminded me a fair bit of the very first horror movie I saw this year, Presence: a slow-paced haunted house movie with a shorter-than-average runtime, a focus more on drama than scares, and a titular but unconventional silent protagonist. But unlike that movie's Presence, there's no benevolent ghost righting past mistakes here - just one angry oiled-up motherfucker with a penchant for suddenly sprinting straight at the camera. Instead, Good Boy's story is told from the perspective of Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever (yes I looked that up) whose chronically-ill owner Todd spontaneously moves out to his late grandfather's home deep in the backwoods. As Todd fights a continuous battle with the threat inside him, Indy is left to deal with the threat outside - a shadowy, incorporeal figure dwelling in their new home's cellar, invisible to all but Indy's canine senses.

On a directorial level, the movie commits unapologetically to its gimmick, minimizing the screen presence of the human characters whenever possible. Expository dialogue between humans is always treated as something in the background that Indy just happens to be present for, and is often muted or muffled when Indy becomes distracted by signs of the shadowy entity's presence. Moreover, there's a clear and deliberate choice to avoid showing a clear human face onscreen throughout the entire movie. Every scene of Indy and Todd interacting is carefully framed to keep Todd's face either out of view or out of focus, and on the rare occasions where a character's face can't be kept out of the shot, it's conveniently obscured in some way - one early scene in the woods outside Todd's house has his fox-hunting neighbor arrive behind Indy in a full ghillie suit. It's a really neat choice that does a lot to not only highlight Indy's emotions, but emphasize his partial disconnection from the human side of the plot - just as Indy is unable to communicate the danger of the dark figure to Todd, Todd's own struggle with his illness is outside the scope of what Indy can understand.

Honestly, there's a lot to love about Good Boy - it's got some solid scares, a powerful plot, and while it is very much a slow-burn build-up, the short runtime means it doesn't overstay it's welcome. That's why it sucks that I can't give this one a proper review in good conscience. Not because there's anything morally abhorrent about the movie's production or anything, but because I don't think I'm qualified to judge one of its strongest assets.

See, there's one little detail about me that some of you guys may already know me well enough to remember, and that I hinted at right at the start of the review: I absolutely cannot fucking stand dogs. Long story short, loud barking and a tendency to suddenly jump at me aren't traits that mesh particularly well with my brand of autism, and getting a chunk taken out of my face as a kid by a dog my family adopted very much against my wishes did not help any. It's not, like, full-on paralyzing fear or anything, but I get deeply uncomfortable around any dog I haven't been forced to get acquainted with over a long period of time, sometimes even to the point of fleeing the room entirely to avoid one.

So, the obvious question there is "Gavin you dumb stupid twink, why the actual shit would you go to a horror movie about a dog protagonist if you don't like dogs?" Well, the film was reviewing really well, and my fear isn't so bad that I freak out at seeing a dog in a movie or anything like that, so I wanted to at least give it a fair shake (no pun intended). And now that I have seen it, I can confidently say this is a very good movie that I am 100% not the target audience for. Technically it's very well put together, it's just that so much of the movie's quality rests on the strength of Indy's performance and emotions, and I can't read dog emotions well. I have a hard enough time reading human facial cues and body language with the autism, so I'm sure as hell not going to do any better with an entirely different species - especially when the self-preservation part of my brain is screaming at me to interpret all of their body language as "KILL MAIM RIP TEAR EAT GAVIN'S FACE SPECIFICALLY!"

So that's where I'm going to have to recuse myself. If I rated this one, I'd either have to rate it based on my personal experience with the movie or give it a hypothetical rating based on how much I think I would have enjoyed it if I could empathize with dogs better, and I don't think either of those would be a useful metric for anyone. Rest assured, though: if I had rated it, it would've gotten a bonus point by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

 

[GavinMcWario]

Okay, fresh off of beating Final Fantasy XVI and eyes full of tears, time to finally write that review I've been procrastinating on since last week!

Shelby Oaks

Historically, when Youtubers decide to make the jump from short-form content to a full-length movie, the results have trended heavily toward the "utterly abysmal" end of the scale. From inexplicable early-Youtube star Fred's even more inexplicable trilogy of self-titled movies, to the various Nostalgia Critic-focused mega-crossovers from the days before Channel Awesome crashed and burned, to Logan Paul's comparatively more recent attempt at cashing in on the dystopian YA bandwagon - and of course, to a certain running joke of mine I'll inevitably be bringing up in the final sentence of this post - there's almost too many examples to list of online personalities incorrectly assuming that their success on the small screen can be easily translated to the big screen.

However, within the horror genre in particular, there's been some surprising success stories as of late. The Phillippou brothers of RackaRacka fame went from making ludicrously violent skits about Ronald McDonald murdering people to dropping back-to-back horror bangers with Talk To Me and Bring Her Back, and just last year Markiplier himself shot to the top of Amazon's streaming charts with his miniseries The Edge of Sleep, to say nothing of his highly-anticipated upcoming movie adaptation of Iron Lung. Of course, that's not to say Youtubers have some natural gift for producing brilliant horror movies (I refer you again to my year-long running joke), but a few of them certainly seem to be carving out a niche in the genre.

With that in mind, I was reasonably optimistic about Shelby Oaks, an indie horror film written and directed by Youtube movie critic Chris Stuckmann. Admittedly, I've only ever heard of Stuckmann in passing and have never actually seen one of his videos, but from what I've gathered he has a good reputation as a critic and a Wikipedia page conspicuously lacking a "Controversy" line in the table of contents, so I decided I'd give him a fair shake instead of assuming it would be complete ass from the get-go.

And to his credit, it wasn't complete ass from the get-go - it starts with an innovative and compelling setup that hooks you into the mystery right away, and only then does it begin slowly devolving into complete ass.

The first 20 or so minutes of the movie takes the form of an in-universe documentary about the Paranormal Paranoids, a group of amateur ghost-hunters who rose to posthumous fame following their mysterious disappearance while filming in the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks and subsequent reappearance as a batch of mutilated corpses dumped in front of a demonic sigil. Through interviews within the faux-documentary, we're introduced to our main character Mia Brennan, whose sister Riley is the sole member of the Paranoids not yet found - and who, according to Mia's stories of their childhood, once believed she was being stalked by a shadowy horned figure. It's a really neat (if somewhat slow-paced) framing device that plays to Stuckmann's Youtube roots, and a part of me still really wishes the film had fully committed to the Blair Witch-esque found footage angle for the duration instead of transitioning back to a normal movie format once the exposition is done.

It's only once the documentary crew wraps things up at Mia's house that the plot kicks off with a bang - specifically, the bang of a self-inflicted headshot, as a strange man named Wilson Miles suddenly turns up at Mia's doorstep with the tape from Riley's missing camcorder before messily offing himself in front of her. Pocketing the tape before the police arrive, Mia takes it upon herself to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance once and for all, delving into Riley's lost footage, Miles's unnerving history, and her own repressed childhood memories as she gradually uncovers the true souce of the unnatural evil inhabiting Shelby Oaks.

And by gradually, I mean glacially. Let's get the big criticism out of the way first: the pacing in this movie is terrible. I'm not saying they should have gone the Michael Bay route and thrown in an exploding car every five minutes to keep my attention, but practically every single scene feels like it's dragged out way longer than it needed to be, and with not nearly enough payoff to justify such a slow-burn approach. I caught myself spacing out more during Shelby Oaks than I did during In a Violent Nature, and half of that movie's runtime is literally just first-person nature trail footage. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I'd sat in the theater for an hour and a half and only seen half an hour's worth of movie.

Of course, this would maybe be somewhat forgivable if the movie we did get was worth the padding - but unfortunately, while Shelby Oaks might be great at setting up an intriguing central mystery, it faceplants hard on resolving that mystery. The first red flags start to unfurl as Mia is conveniently presented with a Big Book of Demons explaining in detail all the supernatural beasties we're going to be seeing in the remainder of the movie, and things only deteriorate from there, the climax descending into a mishmash of overused, predictable, infuriating, and even outright distasteful horror cliches. The whole thing culminates in a "shocking" twist ending so bafflingly inane that I'm still not sure if we were supposed to infer that Mia was being mind-controlled by the demon somehow or if she actually was that fucking stupid.

Honestly, though, as hard as I'm going in on Shelby Oaks right now, I did have to sit on this one for a while before reviewing it. The bad stuff is abysmal, no question about that, but the good stuff is pretty damn good too - I did genuinely like the earlier parts, to say nothing of a movie-stealing scene from living legend Keith David. In the end, though, the glimmers of potential just aren't enough to overcome the movie's derivative plot, piss-poor ending, and utter lack of substance. To paraphrase a different Youtube critic-turned-director, I'll be remembering this one so you don't have to.

4/10, upgraded to 5/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

 

[GavinMcWario]

Man, it's been dead around here lately. Let's get things going again with another movie review!

Keeper

Is it just me, or have there been a ton of romance-themed horror movies this year? Companion, Together, Bone Lake, and now Keeper - if you're into stories about toxic couples driving out to a house deep in the woods and getting wrapped up in something deadly, you're probably having the time of your life right now! (Also Heart Eyes, but that one isn't about a toxic relationship and doesn't happen in a cabin in the woods, so it's not quite as relevant here.)

Despite being heavily advertised as the latest brainchild of modern-day horror visionary Osgood Perkins, it's important to note that unlike his last two memorable outings, Keeper was only directed by Perkins, not written. The screenplay was instead the work of Nick Lepard, whose sole previous writing credit is Dangerous Animals - a shark-centric horror movie from earlier this year that I didn't catch myself but have heard was quite good. Unfortunately, Lepard doesn't seem to have brought quite as much creative energy to this project, as Keeper's basic setup is about as uninspired as they come.

At the start of the film, our protagonist, Liz, sets off with her boyfriend of one year, Malcolm, on an anniversary trip to his family's cabin in the woods, immediately establishing that she has the survival instinct of a pickled turnip by saying the exact words "cabin in the woods" out loud and not instantly recoiling from the crushing sense of imminent doom. Needless to say, once Liz is safely ensconsed in a remote country home with no reliable mode of transport to call her own, her romantic getaway rapidly takes a turn for the uncomfortable - first in the form of Malcom's insufferable brother, who lives in the cabin next door and is all too happy to show up to dinner uninvited to make vague and ominous comments, and then in the form of a totally-not-suspicious chocolate cake ostensibly left by the cabin's caretaker, which Malcolm is weirdly insistent on Liz trying a bite of despite her explicitly-stated distaste for chocolate. From there, things only get weirder for Liz, as she finds herself haunted by inexplicable visions, stalked by unseen creatures, and growing more and more convinced that her boyfriend may be keeping a lethal secret from her.

Written out, it's not a particularly groundbreaking plot - woman goes to isolated location with man she trusts, woman finds out man might not actually have the best intentions for her, horror ensues. But I've come to believe that even a mediocre script can be spun into cinematic gold with the right execution and presentation, and if there's anyone qualified to play the role of Rumpelstiltskin here, it's Osgood Motherfucking Perkins. I can't overstate just how hard this film is carried by Perkins's directing style and cinematography - the etherial depiction of Liz's vision, the masterful use of subtle out-of-focus background details, and of course, the artful concealment of the creatures right up until the grand finale, where we're finally treated to what may be the single coolest original monster design of the year, brought to life with absolutely incredible practical effects.

I spent a large majority of Keeper's runtime feeling confused and captivated in equal parts, totally unable to piece together what was happening and yet completely invested in the mystery and eager to be drip-fed even more baffling dream sequences and ominous warnings. It's only at the end, when the movie's villain finally reveals the truth behind everything, that all the pieces click gloriously into place at once, the context behind every apparent non-sequitur suddenly becoming crystal clear. Admittedly, some might find the earlier parts of the movie painfully slow-paced for that exact reason, but I'm more than willing to put up with some slowness as long as the payoff is worth it, and in my opinion it very much is.

...Okay, it mostly is - the ending goes in kind of a weird direction at the eleventh hour that, despite being heavily foreshadowed throughout the movie, still felt like a bit of an ass-pull to me. But even so, it's a particularly fun shade of weird that I'm willing to grant quite a bit of slack. As a whole, I do have to admit Keeper is probably the weakest of the Osgood Perkins movies I've seen, but that's less a strike against it and more a testament to how much I loved Longlegs and The Monkey. Would highly recommend Keeper if you're willing to accept the extreme slow-burn pacing, but it might be worth waiting until it comes out on streaming - this feels like the kind of movie that's likely better on a second viewing where you can pick out the foreshadowing.

7/10, upgraded to 8/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

 

[GavinMcWario]

Okay, it's been way too long since I updated this thread. In my defense, had to get another surgery done on my eye, so that took me out of action again for like a week. Good news is, because it's been so long, you're getting another two reviews in a row!

Your Host

This may come as a shock to you, but believe it or not, I really love going to the theater. I know it's overpriced as hell, I know it means sitting through half an hour of previews and advertisements before the movie actually starts, I know the stupid Nicole Kidman intro they put before every movie is painfully pretentious and gets more annoying every time I have to sit through it, but god damn it, there's just something magical to me about filling up a big ol' bucket of popcorn and having a shared experience with a bunch of faceless strangers for two hours. (Also I don't have any streaming subscriptions, don't want to pay for them, and am too lazy to learn to torrent, but that's beside the point.)

That all aside, though, sometimes I do like to take a break from the big screen and check out some smaller direct-to-streaming projects, which leads me to Your Host, a minimal-budget indie Saw knock-off where a deranged ex-game show host kidnaps a bunch of generic college students and forces them to play a series of sadistic games where the penalty for losing is a painful death. And also the prize for winning is a painful death, which might sound like poor game design, but keep in mind the cast is comprised of the most deliberately obnoxious and unlikable 20-somethings you can imagine, so that's really more of a prize for the audience.

Let's not mince words here, Your Host is an unapologetic torture-porn film, and how much enjoyment you get out of it is 100% going to be tied to whether or not that's a genre you enjoy. If you aren't all that invested in the idea of extremely painful and unpleasant things happening to deliberately unlikable dimwits, then you aren't gonna want to be anywhere near this one - even as an aficionado of extreme horror movie violence, there was one scene that had even me shielding my eyes. But if all that sounds like it's up your alley, then honestly, there's a fair amount to enjoy here. The games and penalties are creative and intense enough to be entertaining, the effects are pretty good for a small-scale indie movie, and the horrible acting of the rest of the cast is hard-carried by a surprisingly entertaining performance from former Freddy Krueger actor* Jackie Earle Haley, who lends a delightfully unhinged Jim Carrey-esque energy to what would have otherwise been a fairly flat and generic vigilante villain.

*(Yes I know he was only Freddy in the 2010 reboot no one liked, shut up it still counts)

Sadly, there is one particular aspect of the film that left an extremely bad taste in my mouth (okay, besides the tongue scene, but I'm talking more about a metaphorical bad taste than the physiological kind). Given it relates to the villain's motivation and a major third-act plot twist, I've spoilered it below (even though I probably don't need to because I really don't think anyone else in the server is likely to watch this one.) Regardless, while I don't think it completely ruins the movie, I'm definitely going to have to knock a point or two off the final score because of it.

Spoiler

Long story short, it eventually turns out that crazy game show guy's whole villain arc was set off because the final girl lied about him sexually harrassing her so she could use the hush money payments from the TV studio to pay for her mom's cancer treatment. Needless to say, that's the kind of plotline that needs to be handled extremely delicately to make sure the message of your story doesn't accidentally come across as "women who accuse men of sexual misconduct are greedy lying bitches", and if there's one thing we've established about Your Host, it's that it doesn't do delicate. At the very least, I think someone caught the implications at some point, because there's a hastily tacked-on scene at the end of the movie where Haley's character wreaks vengeance on a different game show host who did commit those crimes, but it still makes the final act of the movie fairly uncomfortable, and not in the fun gory way that the film is trying to be uncomfortable.

So, yeah, to sum it all up, this is one of the most conditional recommendations I've even made. If you like super gory stuff in the vein of Saw or Hostel, and you're willing to put up with a cast of unsympathetic, poorly-acted, and painfully incompetent main characters who exist solely to be fed into the meat grinder one by one, and you aren't going to be completely put off by the unpleasant implications of the big reveal, Your Host makes for a pretty fun zero-brainpower ride - but if you're not in that extremely limited target demographic, consider this one a zonk.

3/10, upgraded to 4/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

 

[GavinMcWario]

Okay, long-delayed review done for the uber-violent Saw-wannabe horror movie, now let's jump over to something with the complete opposite genre and tone!

Fackham Hall

I really should go to more comedy movies, but honestly, I feel like there haven't been many that have caught my eye lately? I mean, there was the Naked Gun reboot, obviously, but I'm having trouble thinking of much of anything else. I think part of the problem is that I'm a lot more cautious when looking for a comedy movie to watch than I am with horror movies - a terrible horror movie can still be pretty entertaining in its own way, but there are few experiences more soul-searingly painful than sitting through a terrible comedy. But despite my usual caution, Fackham Hall's amusing trailer and high aggreate review scores convinced me to take a chance on it - and thankfully, this time the gamble paid off in spades.

Styling itself after Downton Abbey and other similar period dramas that I could probably actually name if I'd ever willingly watched a period drama in my life, Fackham Hall is a surprising new representative of a genre I'd long thought dead: the genre spoof movie, popularized by such classics as Airplane, The Naked Gun, and Scary Movie before being thoroughly un-popularized by such dumpster fires as Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans, and... you know what, basically just the entire filmography of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. Seriously, fuck those guys. You know they didn't even actually write any of Scary Movie, right? They were working on a spec script for their own shitty Scream parody at the same time as the Wayans brothers, they found out about it and threw a hissy fit until the WGA gave them co-writer credits to shut them up, and then they used their unearned fame from having their names attached to a goddamn cultural touchstone to churn out shitty zero-effort "parody" movies for the next fifteen years! An entire genre of comedy rendered box-office poison practically overnight, all because two talentless fuckshitters decided they were too good to actually fucking watch any of the things they were being paid to write movies about! Do you have any idea how low of a bar that is to clear? Even that one Youtube jackass who writes edgy racist song parodies for a living has to at least listen to the fucking songs he's parodying! They're the only people in Hollywood whose work would be improved if they just had AI generate their scripts, except they wouldn't even do that because typing a prompt into ChatGPT would still somehow involve ten times more human effort, creativity, and passion than anything they've produced in their entire goddamn careers!

...Sorry, I kind of blacked out for a second there. What was I writing about again? Oh, right, the funny spoof movie.

Set primarily at the titular estate (whose unfortunate name is used for the obvious pun only twice throughout the movie, in an admidable display of restraint), Fackham Hall tells the classic tale of a romance between a rich aristocrat and an impoverished commoner. Tasked by a mysterious gentleman to deliver a letter to the wealthy and illustrious Davenport family, orphaned pickpocket Eric Noone is mistakenly hired as a new servant, only to find himself falling in love with the family's beautiful and strong-willed younger daughter Rose. Of course, their budding relationship faces no small share of obstacles, even outside of the obvious issues of social class - Rose finds herself under increasing pressure to marry her odious cousin Archibald* for the good of the family, the other serving staff have their own misgivings about Eric's conduct, and things only escalate further as Fackham Hall becomes the site of a grisly murder.

*(It should be noted that the role of Archibald - an annoying rich snob with an incredibly punchable face who is significantly stupider and less charismatic than he thinks he is - is played by Tom Felton. Clearly the casting department brought their A-game.)

It's as cliche a storyline as you can get, but being a spoof movie, that's obviously by design. Fackham Hall's plot isn't there to enthrall you with shocking twists or bring you to tears with its beautifully three-dimensional characterization, it's just there to serve as a backdrop for an hour and forty minutes of puns, innuendos, slapstick injuries, sex jokes, and other assorted gags. It's a style of comedy very clearly inspired by Leslie Nielsen - the rapid-fire comedic pacing, the serious deadpan delivery of even the most ridiculous lines, and the frequent use of figures of speech taken far too literally all give the movie a distinctly Naked Gun-esque feel. Admittedly, it never quite got to the point where I was laughing my head off in the theater, but the comedy is still largely solid throughout - far more of the movie's jokes land than not, and even the ones you see coming a mile away are executed well enough that they'll still probably get a chuckle out of you when the punchline hits.

At worst, I could see some people being turned off by how crass a lot of the humor can be - literally the first two jokes in the movie are a masturbation joke and an incest joke, and it starts how it means to go on. However, while Fackham Hall does undoubtedly go for the low-hanging fruit whenever possible, I'd argue it does it pretty well. Because the comedy is so fast-paced, even the grossest jokes are over and done with well before they outstay their welcome, and they rarely if ever fully cross the line into being wholly offensive and disgusting rather than amusing (as opposed to some other spoof movies I could name. Sorry, Scary Movie, I love you and I'm probably going to be quoting you until the day I die, but good god do you have a lot of jokes that are physically painful to sit through.)

All in all, do I see Fackham Hall becoming an iconic mainstay of the spoof movie genre? No, probably not - it's good, but it never quite manages to cross the line into true excellence. Is it worth the price of admission? Absolutely, without a doubt. It's great fun to watch, and there's something to say for a movie that manages to just be good and maintain that quality from start to finish. Probably could have benefitted from being a bit more adventurous in some places, but overall just a solid, thoroughly enjoyable experience.

8/10, upgraded to 9/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.