Weapons
A Film Review
Largely, I am not a big fan of camp in horror, but this one hit different. Horror is a place I go to for one thing: fear. I want my skin to simmer and my hands to clench as the main character walks down the dark hallway to where the witch lies prone on bed and awaits him. I want to shuffle my feet and lose my posture as the final act begins and we race through city streets toward resolution. I don’t want to be taken out of this feeling by a maladroit monster doing something slapstick or spastic—because it kills the fear. It’s as if the writer shields himself from the evil he has awoken, unwilling to face the monster himself, and we, the audience, I feel are let down.
Usually.
But here, in Weapons, Zach Cregger finds a seam between pure terror and comedic relief that when the audience laughs, it is an anxious one, one not quite taking from the intensity of the moment but almost unsettling the stomach, as soon after, each time, we are quickly reminded of the horrid things that are awaiting us at the next cut of the screen.
Told from multiple perspectives with an outright devilish monster, Weapons is a must-see in theaters and the mold for peppering horror with comedy.
8.4/10