There are two corners of horror philosophy that historians have tried to settle for the longest time. Did the Blumhouse movie script exist before the Halloween Horror Nights attraction, or was it the other way around? And why in my opinion it seems the latter?
You could have been distracted by its extensive online advertisement campaign, but the plot of the newest Blumhouse Productions project Imaginary might have been lost on you, so let’s backtrack for a bit. In this fictional narrative, a recovering suicidal mother, Jessica, who pens books for children’s entertainment, appears to have successfully moved on from her previous mental state. She’s got a husband, two new step-kids, and is redecorating her father’s old house. But when her new step-daughter maginizes Chauncey the Bear as her imaginary friend, the eventually always comes back to remember the true events that caused her to leave the house and her family, and later what made her return to it.
But what is Imaginary really? What is the film’s voice? At face value, Imaginary seems to want to pull on familiar imagery from older horror sources and aims to be counted among the more memorable supernatural franchises of the 2010s. And it might just be one of the more memorable Blumhouse films I’ve seen quite recently but for all the wrong reasons.
Throughout the book, the authors reference (because it never travels too far away to be an appropriate reference) the movies Insidious, IT, Coraline at one point, and The Conjuring somewhere in the middle as well on second thought, that’s right. No modern horror movie seems to come to this, because there seems to have been incorporated many of the cultures of other movies, as if a blob melted over a bystander and drew it into the soft skirt of the film. This is because Imaginary ends up being less than a rudimentary number of its components, and many of its elements are there, but they really do not seem to know how to use what it has soaked up. And in a way, it is so masterful in this poor use that one can consider it a magnificent failure.
Aside from its rather impressive first act, the movie’s as if all the ingredients needed to bake a cake were there but somehow the end product came out as an oddly shaped, charred scone instead. The writing of the film, and specifically the dialogue, is far too self indulgent: Packed with a cautious amount of peanut butter, and a hesitant amount of respect for the viewer’s wits and sight. Few seconds ago, other characters dramatized what we easily witnessed while watching the film, and by the fourth or so phrase, where that happened I was forced to surrender to the colloquialism. There seems to be a lot crammed into the film, in particular moments of attempted comic relief, and at times, somewhat out of the blue, manages to deliver a line that makes one laugh but for the wrong reasons. So many things are missed that the score turned out to be humorous without practice, and I even thought to myself that maybe it was deliberate. Admittedly, the clapping in the theater during my performance was quite overwhelming and therefore it made a difference.
It would be right to say that DeWanda Wise’s performance is rather brilliant and it is in a couple of places where she really shines, like the classic horror movie mother trying her best to win over the two kids who have just managed to get out of an extremely dissolute home environment. However, it is the script of this motion picture that is a weak point, which fits all the characters into some trivial templates and subsequently caricatures the same templates.
It is the Carrie star Betty Buckley who takes the best COVEN performance in this film perhaps. She has been given the role of “the weird side character who knows all about occult,” and she pulls it off beautifully.
In the final act, she gets to chew the scenery so much she looks like a zebra carcass being torn apart by a pride of lions in their prime (which is a sight far more gruesome than anything we see in this film, violence-wise, for those anticipating more than a CGI splash of blood, lower your expectations). I completely believe that she was aware that what she had been given was not good and adjusted her performance accordingly, good job to her for the 180 turn and how she made this so much fun.
The monster designs and the costumes in this movie were quite good but extremely underused especially considering the number of jump scares there are in this movie. There is a pretty obvious climax to the movie that is redeemed somewhat by the twist that occurs at the end, but that twist is itself undone by another even less respectable twist that’s introduced just after this twist ends. And for the last thirty minutes, all those who attended this film left for the corridors of my nearby cinema and started talking and laughing aggressively.
Waste “like” payable, nobody would ever let such opportunity recoil from them. And I have strong opinion that failings of the Imaginary make them an ideal banquet for fans of bad movies. The good kind of awful, and should be recognized for its sole strength. It’s tacky, it’s thoroughly broken, and if you dislike that sort of thing, temper your expectations when you go to the cinemas this weekend. But if you enjoy bad horror movies and can watch this movie with a few friends, then this is a great movie to watch. Enjoy watching, all fans of bad horror!
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