We all watching the same movie or what? I thought this was a delight. Tiny cast and location that makes great use of framing, lighting, and fucking sound design to create a sense of tension, humor, and scale beyond its means. The small details in the production design, silhouettes of mentioned ideas, objects appearing and disappearing in the scene, are simple tricks that lend so much effect to the tales being told; charmingly so by everyone involved, but particularly Aya Cash. I'm not really familiar with her outside of hearing about her as of late, but she has a captivating presence here and I'd be glad to see her in more. This was fun, simple, and clever.
Snowy cabin in the woods setting is aces, I LOVE the storytelling premise, interesting sound design, and the creepy tree silhouette/shadowy bloody werewolf hand stuff... but I felt a bad omen that I would dislike this when the tedious car trip intro tried to bank on a ‘James Came-Ron’ joke twice in a minute, and then the smarmy obnoxious writer character dissed Silver Bullett as a trash movie. Don’t get me wrong... There’s some cool stuff here and I love small cast one location style movies, but I really couldn’t vibe with Aya Cash in this, or the numerous horror movie references or the cringe cryptkeeper impersonations.Anyways, I get the appeal of this—there’s good, even great stuff here and there’s a lot of people that’ll love this thing, but I dunno guys... this really wasn’t my jam.Bummer.
This is 100% my kind of movie. I loved it. But YIKES, when I look at some other letterboxd reviews, some people hate it with a passion. So let's just say it's divisive.The story is two horror writers are in a cabin during a power outage and they play a game of which of the two can tell the scariest story. I expected that when they started with a story, it'd cut away to footage of their story and the two in the cabin would just be the framing device. However, the movie stays with them, in the cabin, and you see the two writers actually act out the stories with impressions and theatrics. This movie only works because of the two actors they cast. Both are spot on impressionist, great storytellers and have perfect comedic timing. Aya Cash from You're the Worst was a revelation to me. In the middle of the movie, SNL cast member Chris Redd (St Louis native!) shows up as a third player and adds even more comedy.This movie was really engaging, remarkably original, really funny and eventually turns into a legit horror movie. Keep in mind it's divisive, but I loved it.
