My cinematic catch-up season is well under way, trying to touch on as many big movies that I missed throughout the year as I can, but Malignant needs an angry pitstop. James Wan’s Malignant – after the murder of her boyfriend and an encounter with the supernatural being, Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis) begins to experience strange visions of more murders, that turn out to be true. Firstly, who is this actress? Annabelle Wallis? Oh dayyum, I know Annabelle Wallis – British actress, recognisable from The Mummy and other things; she’s been around. With her hair darkened and American accent, she is totally different! As promotion came and went for Malignant, I would’ve sworn Alison Brie was the star 😅 Then even while watching this movie, you could make a case that Madison is Alison Brie with a few prosthetics around the nose. Amirite? Maybe? ‘Are they cloning actresses these days?’, I thought, for Malignant’s Madison looks like a mesh-up of Alison Brie and Whitney Cummings, I swear to God. But Annabelle Wallis is a good actress in her own right… or I think so; I don’t know, I was too distracted, but I promise to respect her as her own person next time.
It’s a short synopsis for today, embedded somewhere in that opening paragraph, because all I need to say is that this movie is ridiculous. It’s absurd! Heavy spoiling dictates that I tell you that I was pretty convinced I’d figured out the ‘big twist’ a good twenty minutes before the appropriate characters find the video tape and exclaim ‘oh my God 😱😱’. These characters just kept digging and digging, but for about twenty minutes, I was like Randy in Scream yelling ‘look behind you!’ at the TV, but I was screaming ‘there’s a face at the back of her head!!’. Once it turned out to be true, I immediately checked out. Malignant; thanks for wasting my time.
Now, I figure I’m a smartish guy; I see a lot of movies, and so I’m more aware than most of the tricks that movies play to subliminally communicate their stories ahead of time – there’s not much better than watching a movie a second time and realising all the clues were right there in front of you, if only you’d picked them up on first viewing – but I see no reason to watch this a second time. Yet, having said all that, I doubt I’m more aware of horror tropes than famed horror director James Wan; I haven’t seen The Conjuring or many of Wan’s films actually, but I’m aware that his work is very highly reputable. Then you must consider that Wan has done this deliberately; made a movie that is so batshit-bonkers because that’s what he means to do. And to that I say, if you’re doing a lame thing straight, without a self-aware wink and a nod, then you’re still making a lame thing – if I joke around that I might ‘punch you in the face’, and I take a pretend swing and deliberately miss, then maybe I can pass that off as a joke. But if I take a pretend swing and accidently connect, then regardless of my intentions, I’m still the jerk who punched you in the face. And you have a black eye; hilarious, right? This movie leaves a breadcrumb trail using loaves of bread, and it left me so angry that it has such a high score on Rotten Tomatoes, partly because that’s what prompted me to watch it in the first place. No disrespect, but anyone who didn’t see that twist coming is a damn fool.
Fast forward half an hour in my life, and I’ve had a dip at the reviews to see what other people are saying, and the word on the street seems to be ‘camp’ – James Wan deliberately made a B-movie to reflect the days of the 80s and 90s, before horror movies became a big-budget game. I’ve got nothing against camp – I really liked Wonder Woman 1984 because it reminded me of the colourful and corny DC movies of the Batman and Superman franchises. I love the Coen Brothers, who deliberately parody serious storytelling techniques all the time, making The Big Lebowski one much-admired masterpiece because of it. But I’m still relatively new to the horror genre, I’ll admit, so I guess I can extend an olive branch and state that because I’m not saturated in the flow or history of horror, I can’t pick up on subtle waves that go against the grain to decipher if Malignant’s tackiness is purposeful or not, meant only to be devoured like nostalgia – consider me in The Lion King, as Rafiki’s dumber brother; I can feel the winds, but I can’t tell there’s a familiar adult lion across the desert that needs a hug. I’d say James Wan was drunk watching Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone, and wondered if Professor Quirrell would make a great horror villain – he realised he couldn’t make it at all believable or terrifying and went ‘sod it, I’ll make it anyway’… but I can’t be sure. But personally, seriously, I always prefer someone get something out of a movie than for it be panned; those that enjoyed this silly throwback or were in on the joke, then bully for you. I also admire the balls of James Wan to put his reputation on the line, flexing his creativity in the field and deliberately making a ‘bad’ movie – and I defer to the horror community who tell me that that is what’s happened. But c’mon… it’s all well and good to label a movie a goof, but I still had to pay to experience the mental exercise, and I feel robbed.
Anyway, we all go to the movies to feel something – film is the empathy machine, as Roger Ebert called it. Movies can make us cry, or laugh, and lift our spirits. Malignant made me angry. But hey, look at me; I’ve taken time out of my cinematic catch-up season to write this review, and if I was James Wan, any publicity is good publicity. I’ve seen this happen before with the TV show Twin Peaks: The Return; people were lapping it up while nothing was happening. Malignant reminded me of Timber Falls – a funny little B-movie I discovered on Foxtel one night after 11pm – and a bunch of other brain-dead schlock that you would think would be better reserved for hacks and upcoming students of horror with a low budget, trying to get their foot in the door. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad these movies exist for light-hearted fun and a giggle with mates, but not in the cinemas. And I get the mentality of yearning something different – you can lick the slime off a rock because you’re sick of streak to enjoy something different, but you can’t pretend that the slime and the steak are nutritiously equivalent. Can you? Anyway, I wash my hands of this experience now, and move on.
2.5
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