You're Next (2013)

You're Next is the first movie I've seen that feels like a modern incarnation of the modern slasher.  I know that sounds either retarded or aintitcoolnews level over-laudatory, but hear me out.  Every slasher film I've seen in the past decade can be placed into two neat little categories:

1) The always gory, occasionally emotionally punishing painfest where the focus lays less on a body county or cheap rubber masks and more on how many shots of a crying girl being stalked can be inserted into a 100-minute running time.
2) The dogmatically slavish to form "old school" slasher film, which usually plods around like Halloween was released a year ago except that's plenty of time to make winking "ha ha slashers" jokes at the audience while usually completely failing to be even remotely good.

What I liked about You're Next is that it feel like a natural evolution of the slasher, without rubbing the audience's nose in WHOA MODERNITY 9/11 NO ONE IS SAFE ANYMORE that enormous retards like Eli Roth think represent interesting horror theories.  That isn't to say there isn't a relevant theme (that being an outsider being confronted with the easy opulence of the rich), but it's subtle and you can enjoy the movie without even having to pay attention to the director's BIG IMPORTANT POINT.  

The plot is simple enough: qt girl goes with schulmphy dude to meet his rich parents, who are having big family gathering, home invasion occurs, twists, etc.  The bloodless character development goes for about thirty minutes, which does a good job in setting up stereotypes and preconceptions that are (usually) shaped and changed throughout the movies.  The family members are rich and wallowing in various degrees of self-interest, but thankfully it's not another lazy "blah blah rich bad one percent kill all bankers" garbo tour.   The director, Adam Wingard, had a background in mumblecore films, and while I FUCKING HATE THOSE MOVIES JESUS CHRIST it actually is a benefit to You're Next, since the interminable dialogue that is set before us at the start is prefixed on the notion that we will not have to suffer through it for the entirety of the film.  Stuff WILL happen.

And happen it does.  Once the eventual throwdown occurs, the large amount of people gathered at the house means that the plot is a nonstop killbath (gore, for better or worse, is fairly muted).  The twists, once the initial one is realized, are fairly standard and predictable for a veteran horror nerd, but I've at least ascended past watching horror for gasps, I just want a stable follow through.

(I guess I should say SPOILERS here, so if you want to remain pure just assume that I really liked the film)

The big surprise of the film for me was the resilience and likability of the prerequisite "final girl."  I had read the reviews that spoiled that she was tougher than most, and had read that to mean that she was in the vein of final girls that magically GETS TUFF in the final act, which is to say she throws an axe at the bad man or something useless like that.

In actuality, her behavior is "cathartic horror movie veteran soothing."  For the first time I can remember in a long while, when the bad man is knocked down, the heroine actually goes to town on him, viciously stabbing him to death.  It feels weird to cheer for stuff like this, but after 20+ years of seeing the knocked out clown murdermonster just being left to chill in an unsupervised room, it's nice to see good old american LOGIC being applied in this situation.  The explanation for her sudden shift into survival mode strains credulity a tad, but honestly I've been so fucking sick of "the invincible rapist invader king" trope that seeing some sadistic murderers getting dropped in effectiveness from "merchants of fear and suffering" to "slightly more dangerous than the robbers from Home Alone"  warmed my hateful little heart.

Ti West is also immediately murdered, which is pretty good catharsis from sitting through his segment from V/H/S.

So yes, You're Next is a genuinely good horror movie and it's a bizarre shame that good'uns like this and Trick 'R Treat spend years in distribution hell while fucking World War Z get a million screen showing before immediately getting incinerated in the DVD bins.


PS: this film also gets the "Was Never A Fan" award for Best Use of Student Loan Debt in Black Humor.  Congrats!