Rent Freaky on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon (written by)
Directed by: Christopher Landon
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Celeste O'Connor
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
After swapping bodies with a deranged serial killer, a young girl in high school discovers she has less than 24 hours before the change becomes permanent.
Verdict
It's Freaky Friday meets slasher film. This movie knows the genre, exploiting the typical tropes, but it remains entertaining precisely because the killer is a teenage girl and the potential victim is an adult male. It's a lot of fun to watch Vince Vaughn completely committed to the role. Slashers often make little sense and this dismisses all pretense.
It depends.
Review
This starts out as a rather typical horror movie with kids sharing ghosts stories as the lead in to the eventual killer. Comically, the house has numerous weapons and artifacts on the wall that aid a killer. The opening is gory, quite so.
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| Kathryn Newton plays Millie and the Butcher. |
The tone is a bit uneven to start, but that makes sense as this establishes that it's more black comedy than mindless slasher. From the gory opener, this transitions to Millie (Kathryn Newton). She's a quirky girl with quirky friends dealing with her mom post-divorce, bullies at school, and a crush on the popular kid. That's the make up for a boring tween movie, but the body swap concept is a great concept. That plays out really well specifically because of Vince Vaughn. While Newton does a great job playing both roles, Vaughn is more comedic just because he's a tall man playing a teenage girl.
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| Vince Vaughn plays the Butcher and Millie. |
Attitude really is everything as Millie, inhabited by the slasher, rights wrongs and becomes instantly popular. This movie tackles how silly tween and horror movies can be. This provides a great way for the killer to hide, while making the real victim constantly susceptible to being caught.
The movie has a lot of fun with the premise. While it includes a lot of cliches, those payoff as soon as the characters swap bodies.
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