Hot Takes: Malignant

1. This movie is so dumb. I strained an eyeball rolling them so hard. I’ve never groaned so much in my life.

2. This movie knows its dumb! I truly feel like every single person involved in the making of this movie, especially director James Wan, is winking at us and expecting us to wink back. From the awful dialogue to the awkward placement of dramatic music to the predictably stupid actions of the characters, anytime something stupid happened, I felt like Wan was looking dead at me giggling.

3. And I mean STUPID actions of the characters. Why would you go to an abandoned mental hospital on a cliff at night by yourself with no weapon? That’s not a spoiler, because that sentence will make no sense to you until you watch her almost drive off the cliff. But stuff like that felt like, “Yes, people behave in stupid ways in horror movies, so let’s make it super stupid.”

4. I’m quite sure the women’s holding cell at any local jail in the Pacific Northwest does not look like that. Those women were all prostitutes from the 1970s.

5. I went with a friend (who didn’t like it as much as I did and gave the movie a 6) and we both agreed that we didn’t accurately predict the killer. In some ways we were right, and in some ways we were wrong, but when the story is pieced together in the last act, it’s very much a groan/eyeroll/how didn’t I see that coming. I was hollering at the inventiveness though! I personally have never seen this kind of killer.

6. Speaking of inventive, the killer fights backwards. The massacre at the precinct is so much fun and I was howling the entire time. I think that’s where they spent all their money because the whole movie looks like a Cinemax production from 1994.

7. The commitment to bangs is admirable.

8. There are some genuinely shocking and frightening scares in Malignant, which I loved, but for the most part I was laughing the entire time at how ridiculous the whole thing was. I’m not sure who this horror movie is for actually. It’s polarizing, but not in the way a horror movie would typically be, where horror fans are of one mind and causal fans are of another. I’ve seen horror fans love this movie and horror fans hate it. I’m a casual viewer and I thought it was so much fun and so stupidly creative but my friend was “meh” on it. So I don’t know whether to recommend it or not because I don’t see any consistent trends for who likes it and who doesn’t.

9. So here are the PROS: the villain is a new take on an old trope, which I love.
The action scenes are excellent. They’re done very well and this fight choreographer really thought about how people move.
It’s fun! It’s a “talk to the screen” kind of horror movie. “Why are you doing that? Don’t go in there! Turn around!!”

10. Here are the CONS:
The dialogue is clunky! (which I found fun, because it made it feel that much more low-budget 90s B Movie)
The acting is clunky! (which I also found fun, because I felt like they were doing it on purpose)
The music is awful and almost always terribly misplaced! (which, again, I found fun! I laughed every time)
The twist ending leaves a VERY LARGE PLOT HOLE from the first act and I need somebody to explain that fight to me.

11. Bonus for Black Millennials and Gen X: