Review: It Follows

Cross-posted from www.kingyak.com:

So there’s this blond girl who likes to swim. That’s pretty much the extent of the protagonist’s character depth. I’m sure that she and the other characters in the movie had names, but I really can’t imagine anyone who wasn't directly involved in production bothering to learn them. I certainly didn’t so, I’m going to refer to them as blond girl, blond girl’s sister, reader girl (because she reads), and friend zone guy (because I’m pretty sure he spends a lot of time on internet forums bitching about being put in the friend zone). These descriptions probably make the characters seem more interesting than they actually are. All of these people spend their time at blond girl’s mother’s house watching old public domain sci fi movies and being boring as shit. Blond girl’s mother is sometimes there, but only speaks in once scene that was presumably included mainly to prove to us that the mother is played by a human actress and not a mannequin.

Once the film makers have established the existence of people who can technically be described as characters, blond girl goes out with a guy who seems paranoid and he chloroforms her after they have sex. Turns out this isn’t because he failed date rape class, but because he has to tie her in a wheelchair so he can show her a woman walking toward them really slowly.This is the It That Follows. It’s been following him, but now it’s going to follow her because the It is a symptom of some kind of supernatural herpes he gave her.

What It does is follow, really slowly. If it catches you, it kills you (by dry humping you while leaking water from the crotch), but it’s easy to outrun because it just walks toward you. So it’s kind of like Jason, but without the hockey mask or the machete or the ability to teleport to a spot right in front of you so it can kill you. It can change its appearance, but since only the person it’s following can see it and it never speaks, that’s really not really relevant in any discernable way. If blond girl screws somebody else, It will start following them, but if It kills that person it will return to following her. If It kills her, it will go back to following her date, and so on until it works its way back to patient zero for the dumbest STD epidemic ever.

Most of the rest of the movie consists of the group of unengaging characters moving from place to place to avoid the It That Follows. As you may have already guessed, a monster that can be easily avoided by moving away at a brisk pace does not lead to edge-of-your-seat suspense. Since there’s no mythology behind the monster for the characters to discover, most of the movie consists of the characters going somewhere, maybe experiencing a cheap jump scare, noticing the monster, and going somewhere else. At some point the cool guy across the street joins them and blond girl passes the It to him (which doesn’t make friend zone guy very happy), but the It kills him.

After cool guy dies, friend zone guy tells blond girl that he really wants to help her. With his penis. She turns him down (almost certainly not for the first time) and seems resigned to eventually being killed by the It, but then he has a brilliant plan. The brilliant plan involves luring It into a pool and electrocuting it, which makes sense because….reasons? It doesn’t work, but some bullets to the head might have (even though a bullet to the head failed to take the thing out before). In any case, there’s a shitload of blood in the pool when they’re done.

In the next scene blond girl finally bangs friend zone guy, but it’s unclear whether she’s passing the It to him or if they think the It is dead. I kind of hope she was supposed to be passing It to him, because otherwise this movie is pretty much a fairy tale for the Elliot Rodgers crowd. The next scene shows friend zone guy driving slowly past some hookers, so maybe we’re supposed to assume that he passed the It to them. I don’t really know, and can’t say that I care.

In conclusion, It Follows is a horror movie with exactly none of the things that make for a good horror movie. I’m not going to give this one a star rating because even zero seems like too much. This doesn’t feel like a movie made by people really bad ideas executing them poorly at every turn. It’s more like a movie made by aliens who have seen a horror movie but don’t quite understand how the human brain processes fiction. Even if I could get the money and time I spent on this movie back, it wouldn’t be enough.