This teen horror film is a tedious exercise indeed, based on really nothing much at all, except what can be scared out of us - I wasn’t - by ambient electronica to underline the rather tired, trite action.
This involves disturbed looking people popping up out of nowhere and walking zombie-like towards the hapless young 17-year old Jay (Maika Monroe) who typically runs in terror.
Early in the story, Jay is seduced by Hugh (Jake Weary - now what kind of surname is that?). He spoils it all by telling her that she had better go now and find someone else to sleep with. Otherwise she will be plagued by the Thing, which may come as a stranger or as someone she knows and loves.
If she doesn’t seduce someone herself soon, then the Thing will ultimately do away with them all. That's her, and then him, and back along the line of seduction to where the whole, er, thing began.
Fancy Jay’s luck meeting someone who carries such a deadly virus, as it were, but deal with the Thing she must. She begins to see visions of rather odd characters, beginning with a naked woman who strides catatonically towards her.
Then there’s the old, grey-haired woman who fixes Jay with her haunted stare as she sits in English class listening to her teacher recite - very badly, by the way - TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock. Stick in a bit of Eliot and you immediately have some kind of literary credibility is the thinking presumably.
Weirdly everything aside from a shell-shaped smart-phone suggest a 1970s time warp. Jay and her drippy friends sit around watching grainy old horror movies on old TV sets in Seventies-era décor living rooms. Yet the dress sense seems contemporary to this reviewer, so search me (or maybe not, actually.)
Thus the dreaded, er, thing rolls along clunkily and humourlessly towards a very silly climax involving the attempted electrocution of the Thing with a variety of 1970s-era electrical appliances at a swimming pool.
A truly execrable piece of cinema. Don’t even think about it.
Paddy Kehoe
