Proxy
My Review: I kind of doubt this movie really counts as horror at all. It’s definitely full of seriously nutso people though. The horror is that everybody might be as crazy as every character in this movie is.
The movie begins with a woman getting a sonogram near the very end of her pregnancy. Shortly after, she’s mugged and beaten, and loses the baby. When she goes to support group meetings for the trauma afterwards, she meets up with another woman who has lost her own son and husband. Then later she catches that same woman in a shopping mall screaming that her son is missing, and follows her to find that she had her son in her car, which she brings in to show the guard like “oh okay, I found him outside”. So she does have a son, and she likes to pretend she has one issue or another to get attention.
From there, things continue to spiral further out of control in crazy crazy ways. She looks into this woman, finds out she has a husband too, she gets obsessed with the woman, and... well, I feel like I wouldn’t want to spoil any of it, which is probably a good sign for the movie. But it’s not really that great of a movie, it’s just such a nutty plot that my jaw was just dropped the whole thing going “is this what is really going on here?” There are lots of twists and surprises, but I’m not sure any of them qualify as clever, just more out of left field than anything. All in all, the story ties up neatly with a lot of coincidence. It doesn’t make any sense, but not because of broken logic, just because there’s no way that many totally insane people could be living seemingly normal lives and come across each other.
The worst thing about the movie is the extreme slowness of the beginning half. I mean that in two ways: the traditional “long slow shots and not much movement in the plot” sense, but also
holy burritos is there slow motion in this movie. At one point, the woman is in a bathtub being morose (which kind of shows you how the plot is slow, huh?), and we watch one of those 1000fps shots like on Mythbusters, of a drip coming from the faucet and falling down and splashing on the water. It’s cool to see in the Mythbusters sense, but I’m trying to watch a movie. This does not add to the plot. Then later, the pivotal scene in the movie where everything goes off the rails (a shotgun is involved) is entirely in slow motion. It’s probably 3 minutes long of slowly cocking the shotgun, firing a blast, guts flying everywhere, people screaming, water splashing, and wait we’re not done, more screaming, actual words being shouted in slow motion, cock the gun again, carefully position it, consider what you’re doing, and then
another blast, more guts flying... it’s so brutally ludicrous that it looks like something from a parody movie. It was almost funny, but just whoa.
So yeah, it’s all very overly-affected, melodramatic and super-depressing. But wow, it was interesting too. It’s akin to a lot of 90’s movies, like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, movies where there are a bunch of characters whose lives intersect in overly-coincidental ways and it all leads to a big mess.
My Rating: 3/5 Hoodies.
My Movie Idea: Watching this movie actually made me think of an old idea I had. This is a truly horrible concept, so maybe turn away now. Anyway, my movie is the story of a woman who gets pregnant as often as she can, has the baby, and then moves to a new town where nobody knows her and starts again. Where does the child go? Well, that’s the horrible part. The woman is a very unique sort of cannibal - she has children in order to eat them. Obviously that’s not all she eats or she’d die, but that’s her disgusting obsession. As to what the plot is for this movie, I couldn’t tell you, but it would obviously involve somebody discovering what she’s up to and trying to get evidence and save her latest child before it’s too late. Hard to rescue a baby that’s inside someone though, so it all hinges on a climactic sequence right after she gives birth. Probably like Proxy, it would rely on a lot of coincidence, like this is a person who also moved to the same new town from the woman’s old town, so they recognize her and wonder what’s going on.
I apologize.
