I’m really hoping this isn’t some kind of weird fever dream, given that I spent this week being shittily cyberbullied (?) by Jason Lei Howden, the director of Deathgasm.  I’m hoping that I didn’t just fall over laughing after being told I don’t deserve to watch his film and bashed my head and somehow I just hallucinated all of The Boy, because I’m here to tell you dear readers – that movie was pretty fucking dope.

For those playing the home game, if you’ve been a reader over here in the Graveyard for a while, you will know, no doubt that I am something of the doubting Thomas when it comes to horror movies.  I generally don’t believe that any of them will shock and or frighten me.  Call me a realist, call me jaded, call me whatever, but I have had enough shitty ghost stories jammed down my throat to last a life time.  Whenever people start on about the latest Hollywood horror film and how its “AS SCARY AS THE EXORCIST”, my eyes start rolling out of my fucking skull.  I’m a care aide.  I once saw an old lady covered in someone else’s blood come staggering out from a darkened hallway and then proceed to hulk smash a TV in front of me while jabbering about how the Devil lived on the ceiling.  I’ve seen some shit okay?

Anywho, like many others, I saw the trailer for the Boy when I went to see Hateful Eight in theatres and damn…  looks like a total snore right?  It’s got Maggie from the Walking Dead in it and let’s be serious..  she ain’t that great and you all know how I feel about the goddamn Walking Dead and how I would sooner saw my own dick off with a rusty cooking spoon than ever have to watch another episode of that god forsaken show.

Anywho.  Like I was saying before the dick sawing..  I hate Maggie in the Walking Dead.  I hate the Walking Dead.  As soon as I saw Laura Cohan’s smiling face and the creepy haunted doll imagery, I was groaning.  Another shitty paranormal partially creepy doll James Wan style wank job..  let me guess.. let me just dig out my old crystal ball of how this fucking movie is going to go.  One moment.

Hmm..  yes I see it all so clearly now.  Shittily thrown together script with crappy dialogue written by someone who has never read a book and has a ninth grade reading comprehension level, and uh..  oh I see it now..  some weird creepy Vaudevillian puppet thing that James Wan may or may not have left peter tracks all over and then oh yes, some creepy paranormal force we won’t ever actually see and then jump scares, oh yes, the jump scare line in your palm is many knotted with jump scares as far as the eye can see…

….at least, that’s what I assumed.  WELL.  I’m happily here to tell you fine fuckers that tonight for dinner I’m eating crow and it tastes great..  so join me while I slather some ketchup on that shit and get to chewing.

So The Boy starts off as most horror flicks do, with smiling bimbos being led out into the remote countryside, only in this case it’s Maggie from the Walking Dead and maybe I don’t recognize her without a year’s worth of accumulated grease and shitloads of weapons, but she looks like the weird Christian horse girl we all went to school with.

Okay, before you weird perverts get all hot and bothered, you absolutely do not get to see Maggie’s funbags..  But you’re free to wax your carrot to this shower scene photo anyways.  I won’t tell anyone.  Maggie decides to leave the Ricktatorship and become a nanny for an old British couple and let’s be serious, who wouldn’t want to go live in a dope as fuck half castle out in the British countryside and chillax in a giant study sipping on cognac and babysitting some little shits you can send to bed whenever you want for drawing pictures of the Queen’s teeth?  Like.  That’s everyone’s dream job.

As with most things, Maggie (or I guess she’s called Greta in this, who cares..) meets the little friend she’s gonna be babysitting and let’s just say he’s got a stiff upper lip.

I will one hundred percent see myself out after that last joke, but yeah anyways.  Turns out the little boy named Brahms is actually a doll.  Unsure of if she should laugh, cry, or run screaming right off the white cliffs of Dover, Greta reluctantly accepts, like we all do, that her employer is completely crazy and does a lot of smiling and nodding.

The couple tells her that they are going on holiday and give her a list of rules in order to take care of Brahms, including no guests (house parties are out, sorry guys), he must wake up at a certain time, go to bed at a certain time, he likes his music cranked up to deafening (he must be related to the crackheads that live underneath me), and she must always speak loudly to him.  Totally normal right.

Greta sees the old couple off and does what anyone else would do with a swank ass job like that – proceeds to get day drunk and pass out in the afternoon while summarily ignoring the creepy ass doll, like anyone would do.  Isn’t that what babysitting is all about?  Getting totally shit tanked while little bastard children sleep and piss and do whatever else children do?  Of course it is.

Unfortunately for Maggie she can’t dial up anything on wifi because there is none, so she can’t even wank it to the latest on pornhub or read Perez Hilton or go on instagram or whatever it is the kids these days do (help me I’m old!).

Luckily for her though, the grocery delivery dude has a British accent and a penis and like any woman who drinks a lot of red wine and has had a sketchy past of shady boyfriends, she is immediately charmed.  Also he doesn’t have the dreaded British teeth, so he’s even more handsome.  His name is Malcolm and he’s one of the only people to be up front with her about how fucking weird it is for this couple to have a little doll they believe is their dead son.

Malcolm tells Greta/Maggie that Brahms died in a fire on his eighth birthday which sucks kinda because it doesn’t say if he died after opening his b-day presents or before, because if it was before, that’s probably the whole reason he’s haunting the goddamn house to begin with, he was hoping to get that Mighty Max playset and went to the grave not knowing if he did or not..  and that shit is enough to drag anyone’s spirit into purgatory.

Since Greta has been shirking her responsibilities and engaging in some on the job flirtation, it takes her a while to notice that things aren’t really all they seem with the creepy Brahms doll, like how it moves around by itself.

While getting ready for date night by drinking more wine and putting on a dress from Forever 21, Greta gets trapped in the attic for some reason and gets knocked out and sleeps there in a towel all night while Malcolm distinctly does not get any pussy.  Cock blocked by a porcelain doll.  The friend zone is real.

Greta begins to realize there’s a bit more to Brahms than she had thought and when next Malcolm rolls up, she’s 100% having a nervous breakdown and talking to the doll as if it were a child and demonstrates to Malcolm how the doll can move around by itself.

Even Malcolm who is even more of a doubting Thomas than I, admits that there’s a lot more going on.  The movie dragged a bit at this point and got a little boggy when Greta confesses to Malcolm that the reason she fled the Ricktatorship is because her old boyfriend was a woman beater and after she got pregnant with his kid, like any trailer trash relationship, he beat her until she wasn’t pregnant anymore.

Greta explains that this is why she feels connected to the Brahms story, because she too feels like she understands the loss of a child.

This moment was so out of place in a horror film that it was actually rather brilliant.  It was simple.  There was little hard hitting drama, and the simplicity is really what sold the whole thing.  In the periphery, Greta speaks to her friend at home and finds out that her woman beating exboyfriend has gotten her address and she starts expecting dead animals, black roses, or whatever else stalker exboyfriends send after they beat their women until they kill the baby inside.

Malcolm also tells her that though she feels a strong connection to Brahms, the day of his eighth birthday, a little girl who was his friend was murdered, and when the police came to question him, the fire in the house had started and Brahms was already dead.

Of course we know at this point that the only package she will be receiving is in the form of a large male human arriving in the house and that is exactly what happens when exboyfriend trailer trash rolls up and starts bossing Greta around.  Greta who 100% believes the Brahms story is reluctant to tell Mr. Babykiller (his name is Cole) to take a fucking hike, and when Malcolm shows up, things get a bit weird.

A little bit previous to this, we see that the Brahms’s parents have written him a letter from their holiday location where they say that the girl is his forever and then they fill their pockets with rocks and jump into the ocean.  Some Dr. Shirley Turner shit, right?

Cole tells Greta he bought her a plane ticket home, and she nods and heads off to bed with Brahms who she promises to never leave.

A short while later, in the middle of the night, Greta is awoken by screaming to find Brahms in the living room having a sleep over with her ex boyf and written on the walls in blood is the ominous GET OUT.  Since this dude is clearly a rational person, he starts screaming at Greta and threatens her and knocks her around a bit.

Malcolm who was taking a nap out in his truck in the driveway hears the screaming and comes running and finds angry exboyfriend wielding the doll and swinging it around while Greta screams at him to stop.

In the commotion, the doll is shattered.

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Are you ready?  SPOILER ALERT.

SPOILER ALERT.

SPOILER ALERT.

SPOILER ALERT.

If you do not wish to read the spoiler, stop reading and go see the goddamn movie.

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After the destruction of the Brahms doll, loud pounding and banging is heard throughout the house and the walls begin to shake.

Bitchy boyfriend hears banging from behind a mirror and goes to listen.

Obviously the mirror smashes and out comes..

what?  A ghost?  some terrible cgi?  a cloud of pixels?

Nope.  Straight up a full grown fucking hairy man in a child’s mask emerges from inside the goddamn walls and kills the ever loving shit out of the exboyfriend with the broken Brahms doll head.

Turns out that Brahms didn’t actually die and was living in the fucking walls the whole time and is now a near 30 year old man.  It’s some for real adult baby stuff and literally everyone in the whole fucking theatre screamed and started freaking the fuck out.

Man Brahms makes chase and Greta and Malcolm attempt escape within the very walls from which Brahms emerged and find that there are secret passageways and a secret hide out inside the walls where he has constructed his own lifesize Greta blow up doll and has been listening to conversations and watching them the whole time.

Malcolm suffers a pretty heavy beating by Brahms and Greta manages to escape but not before she realizes she really wants to fuck Malcolm and she goes back for him.

She faces off with Man Brahms who speaks to her in the fucking creepiest British accent child’s voice, I swear to fuck.  And she orders him to bed where he demands a kiss as per the nightly ritual and rules (and because he obviously wants her to rub her itty bitty titties in his face), and she stabs the shit out of him, saves Malcolm and drives off into the British night, leaving the screen to show us the Man Brahms, painstakingly putting together the broken doll.

Disturbing, yes?

Upsetting, yes?

I fucking loved this film, because I had to pick my lower jaw up off the goddamn floor as we exited the theatre.  Haven’t been that impressed by a Hollywood horror in a long time.

It managed to take something we all know – the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs, retard Jason, and that phenomenon of people living unknown inside walls of houses and mix it all together and end up coming out with something totally new, yet familiar and safe enough for regular movie goers, but still dope as fuck enough for someone like me who is generally pretty jaded about film going as a whole.

Here to tell you guys that eating crow has never tasted so good, and if Hollywood takes it’s own advice and stops remaking, and making shitty terrible horror and instead sticks to ideas like this, with even a slight amount of innovation, the genre is going to move forward, and I for one hope it does.

With that all in mind, go see the goddamn movie.