Well hello there tiny friends.  I haven’t left my house a whole lot this week, being that I just wrote an exam from Hell yesterday, so I’ve been studying a lot and wearing sweatpants..  jealous?  I’m sure you are.

Anywho, since apparently I have nothing better to do, I decided to make a snack and check out the new Jason Blum, Blumhouse pictures release, “Hush”, which was released on Netflix about a week ago.  I read online that it was a “home invasion horror, done right”.  Not sure what that means, but I am a fan of home invasion horror, and have previously reviewed You’re Next, and moreover was a big fan of the film The Strangers.  Thinking back now, I think I preferred The Strangers to You’re Next, if only because there was no big motive reveal at the end of The Strangers, it was simply crime for crime’s sake and maybe the sociopath in me just gets that.  I dunno.

I’m gonna be straight up here and tell you all right now that Jason Blum isn’t really someone of whom I am a huge fan.  Like..  he’s all over all the modern Hollywood horrors like Insidious, The Purge, and Paranormal Activity, and aside from Lords of Salem, Dark Skies, and The Purge, I generally credit films like Paranormal Activity and Insidious as being real shitpiles that do nothing to further the genre forward.

Also, Jason Blum was most recently the season finale guest judge on Face Off where the contestants had to create a series of horror makeups for some horror films based off a Jason Blum short story, which was actually kind of neat.

Real talk right now, I fucking love Face Off, it’s such garbage trash television, and I’m definitely super into seeing Glen Hetrick each week so I can admire his Hot Topic outfits.

K, real talk – Glen Hetrick is the best dressed goth girl I’ve ever seen.  McKenzie Westmore from Face Off follows me on twitter, but Glen Hetrick refuses to respond to my cyberbullying and it’s tearing me up inside.  Y U DO DIS.

Anyways, back to Jason Blum and the films that are slowly ruining horror cinema, I didn’t have high hopes for Hush really.  I mean, I heard it was good, but I had also heard Deathgasm was good (YOU LIE MCBEARDO), and we all know how that turned out, when the director went nuts on me on twitter.

Anywho, this is one of those rare times where I watch a film and it actually manages to get and hold my interest the entire way through and keep me both engaged and entertained, and that’s fucking rare with Hollywood these days.  It’s starting to happen more and more.  Films like The Boy, and Krampus are both hollywoodian horrors that have gotten and kept my attention by trying out new concepts.

Now, to be sure, not all new concepts automatically translate into good movies, but I’m super over films that play it safe by trotting out the same boring tropes in hopes that the audience won’t notice how badly they’re being patronized to.

So the basic premise of this film is around Maddie Young, a young author who lives alone in a house out in the woods.  What makes Maddie unique is that following a bout of meningitis at age 13, she was rendered completely deaf and mute.  She communicates by reading lips and sign language.

Her friend Sarah comes over and they have an exchange in sign language, which is actually pretty neat because I’ve never seen sign language used in a horror film before.

At this point it was very apparent that this movie had my attention.

If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million times more, I’m very much a fan of innovation and movies will often get an A for effort for me simply for having the cajones to step outside the box.  This play on the deafness of the character as well as the limited communication capabilities opened up the movie quite well and ensured that my attention was grabbed early.

Maddie is an indecisive author struggling to finish her latest book, one that has seven different potential endings.  She tells her friend that she can envision each ending as if it were a movie (like Sherlock Holmes??????) and that she has to be able to see how something will go in order for it to be right.  Pay attention to tis detail.

Due to Maddie’s hearing impairment she unfortunately does not hear her friend beating the living fuck out of her door and trying to get her attention as a masked man creeps behind her and stabs the living shit out of her.

Sarah dies on Maddie’s front porch, and the masked man quickly understands that Maddie can’t hear shit and as she settles in for a long night of dicking around on her macbook, he sneaks inside and steals her phone and begins creepily taking photos of her and sending them to her via text and very quickly she is intensely creeped the fuck out.

Of course she locks him out, but since he has a fucking crossbow and a machete..  she’s kinda screwed.  Then he fucking knocks out the power, and slashes the tires on her car.  And without wifi or electricity and no phone, she can’t call for help.

Maddie writes on the window of the the door that she didn’t see his face, as he is masked, and that her boyfriend will be home soon.  The man removes his mask and tells her that now she has seen his face, and he communicates with her and tells her that he’s going to come in and kill the shit out of her, and that he can do this whenever he wants and then he walks away.

So anyways, that’s not a good situation at all.  What the fuck would you do?

Maddie does what anyone would and begins freaking the fuck out.

K.  The dude in the mask..  he’s played by a dude who was in Law and Order SVU, and I have to ask..  is he hot as fuck to anyone else?  Especially with his super edgy neck tattoo and creepy mask?  I dunno.  I can’t tell if males of the species are hot anymore.  Rigby and I suffer from a condition where if you put a man in front of us on the television for long enough we just kinda think he’s attractive and stuff gets weird.

There’s definitely been conversations that start with one or both of us going, “Is that guy hot?” and it usually ends with, “he has one eye and a flipper hand.”  And the shame never seems to wash off.  Hit me up if this masked dude is pretty fly for a white guy.

The two engage in a game of cat and mouse fuckery.  Maddie’s dead friend gets propped against a window and then Maddie decides to try to retreive her dead friend’s phone to call the 5-0.  No dice.

At one point she gets shot in the leg by the masked man and as he scales up a lattice behind her she rips his crossbow from his hands and bashes him in the face with it.  She clearly will not go down without a fight, and I was very involved in the back and forth fighting to the point that I was apparently yelling, “DEVASTATING”

“BEAT HIS ASSSSS!!”

My housemate could hear me and texted me to ask if I was watching wrestling.  Somehow that’s more weird than what I was actually doing but go with me on it.

Since our lovely Maddie got nicked in what appeared to be the lateral descending branch of the circumflex femoral artery (knowledge is power), she would have probably bled to death in a quick hurry, but since this is hollywood, she spends the rest of the movie, losing blood, slowly going into hypovolemic shock.

FUN!

Her friend Sarah’s boyf shows up and the killer plays like a cop and kindly stabs him in the fucking neck.

Realizing that she cannot outrun the killer, Sarah calls him a coward and challenges him to fight her.  Her realization comes from the “voice” in her head as she envisions all the possible endings to her current situation.  She understands that if she doesn’t do something she will bleed to death.

The final battle takes place in the house and as Sarah sits drifting in and out of consciousness, the killer breaks a window behind and lowers himself down behind her and says that he’s pretty sure he can make her scream.  Oh jeez Rick, misogyny much?

His whispered breath grazes her neck and her heightened senses alert her to his prescence and she stabs the ever loving shit out of him, sprays him in the face with hornet spray, and then pops a corkscrew into his neck and he’s finally done.

She phones the cops and sits on the porch as police lights illuminate the road.

 

 

In all, the movie was good.  It grabbed my attention early and managed to keep it, and I sat at the edge of my seat for most of it.  I was interested and desperately wanted Maddie to win.  Easily worth the watch and was a fun one.  I was genuinely surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did, so I really do recommend it.  It wasn’t anything particularly special but I enjoyed the innovation and really got behind the idea that the masked killer was simply killing for the sake of killing much like the intruders in the Strangers who answer their victim’s question of “why” with “….because you were home..”