VILLAINS is a 2019 indie movie I’ve wondered about for a while. It uses the reliable formula “somebody tries to rob a house and discovers a horrific thing going on there.” Other ones that come to mind are THE COLLECTOR, LIVID and DON’T BREATHE. This is a much jokier take on the format than any of those, more of a dark comedy than anything, but I’d say it’s at least horror adjacent. There are maniacs doing something crazy, it takes death seriously, it stars two perhaps underrecognized greats of contemporary horror… yeah, I’ll count it as horror.
It’s about a couple of addled deadbeats named Mickey (Pennywise/Orlok/The Crow himself Bill Skarsgård) and Jules (Maika Monroe, THE GUEST, IT FOLLOWS, WATCHER, LONGLEGS) who clumsily rob their last gas station, intending to use the money to move to Florida and start a new life selling seashells. Trouble is they run out of gas on a remote, wooded road. They are not criminal masterminds.
On foot they find a large, isolated house where no one seems to be home. They break in, hoping to steal the car in the garage or come up with some other escape plan. But they face a moral dilemma when they find a young silent girl (Blake Baumgartner, MADELINE’S MADELINE) chained up in the dark basement. (read the rest of this shit…)
I was in the mood for some more Christmas horror, and I tried this movie BODY – the 2015 American movie, not the 2015 Polish movie – for the following two reasons: it showed up in Shudder’s holiday section, and the running time was 75 minutes. I had not heard of it, but it’s something that played the Slamdance Film Festival and is distributed by Adam Yauch’s company Oscilloscope Laboratories.
