From the very birth of the genre, horror cinema used to draw innovation from those little independent movies, pearls that, with a bunch of money and a lot of ideas dare to challenge the tradition and rebuild the imaginary, giving new life to the genre itself. Then, the new idea starts to spawn a lot of copycats; it becomes the new tradition, turning into a market: it’s time for another independent movie to revolutionize the situation with a new trend. And so on, and so on. Unfortunately, there’s also a group of independent directors who believe to be the heralds of new tendencies, while in reality they’re just creating a jigsaw out of ideas and stimulations grabbed from their predecessors: that’s the case of You’re Next, fifth work of the Tennessee born film director Adam Wingard.
It all begins in an isolated house in the woods, just like the classic slasher movies. Paul and Aubrey Davison are about to celebrate thirty-five years of marriage, and they decide to reunite the entire family for the occasion. In a couple of days, the four grown-up children, Crispian, Drake, Felix and Aimee, arrive with their respective partners, Erin, Kelly, Zee and Tariq. From the very moment the whole family is reunited under the same roof, the old grudges surface once again among the brothers, but everything is abruptly interrupted when the Davisons realize they’ve been targeted by a group of maniacs. Three killers with animal masks are, in fact, sieging their house with the intent of killing the occupiers one after the other. The family reunion soon becomes a battle for survival…
The movie is a neverending portrait of the director’s and the writers’ ineptitude, in a race for the emulation that ends up only to highlight the inadequacy of the copy. It all starts with Scream, but Wingard is no Craven; next comes The Strangers, but even Bryan Bertino looks like a master in comparison; many visual suggestions are recycled from Friday the 13th, but besides deaths and mutilations there’s nothing even similar to Sean S. Cunningham; doors are destroyed with a hatchet using the same framing as The Shining; a conclusion in Night of the Living Dead style is attempted, but there’s no sign of the intelligence and the political spark of Romero.
And so on, copy after copy, in a childish attempt to plug a social reflection. I’d better not to mention the actors at all, as everyone seems to pretend to be in a Shakespearean tragedy (there’s even something like a reference to Macbeth) with an acting ability barely fit for a school play.
The so-called script is more than defective as well, and the dialogues causes plenty of unwanted laughs (a little example: “I want you to fuck me on this bed, beside your dead mother!” “What?! And why should I do something like that?” “You never want to do anything interesting.”)
Just like Tobe Hooper once said, “There’s nothing funnier than an ugly horror movie”, and You’re Next is a good proof of this inherent truth: uncertain anatomical knowledge, plain idiocy of the selected victims, some dubious vital statistics (the two people celebrating thirty-five years of marriage don’t even have 50 years each…), a more than a foreseeable coup de théâtre, an obvious ending sequence, unwanted horror parodies of Home Alone, and much else. In the end, this is more similar to a comic movie than to a horror one; You’re Next is more than evitable, more than forgettable, more than embarrassing.
