It’s Time to Accept a Message Request From ‘Drop’

April 10, 2025

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They certainly dropped Drop like it’s hot (CREDIT: Universal Pictures)

Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Reed Diamond, Gabrielle Ryan Spring, Jeffery Self, Ed Weeks, Travis Nelson

Director: Christopher Landon

Running Time: 95 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Chekhov’s Poison (and Gun and Knife) and Flashbacks of Abuse

Release Date: April 11, 2024 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Widowed mother Violet (Meghann Fahy) is finally ready to start dating again a few years after the dissolution of her abusive marriage. So she calls up her sister Jen (Violett Beane) to babysit her 5-year-old son Toby (Jacob Robinson) so that she can finally meet up with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), the hunky, sensitive photographer that she’s been messaging with. They settle in for dinner at a fancy high-rise spot, and the vibes are totally right… until someone starts anonymously sending Violet messages demanding that she kill Henry if she doesn’t want her son to die instead. As she desperately seeks an escape from this entrapment, she starts playing detective to identify the criminal puppetmaster: could it be the seemingly sweet bartender (Gabrielle Ryan Spring), the older gentleman getting back out there on a blind date (Reed Diamond), the totally extra waiter (Jeffery Self), the skeevy piano player (Ed Weeks), the rando she keeps bumping into (Travis Nelson), or maybe even one of the teenagers on a post-prom excursion?

What Made an Impression?: It’s So Much Fun Watching Someone in Danger!: Drop is the sort of propulsive, dread-inducing thriller that never lets up long enough for you to get hung up on how much it strains credulity. Although, now that I’ve watched it and I’m writing my review, I’m more than happy to raise some questions! Most pressingly, does the AirDrop feature really allow you to be this intrusive into someone who’s not in your contacts? I’ve never been an iPhone user, although to be fair to Drop, Violet’s tormentor is actually using an AirDrop stand-in called “DigiDrop.” I could go on to nitpick even further, but here’s the thing: I didn’t care about any of that! This movie establishes its rules of play and never cheats, so its twists and zooms feel earned, no matter how ridiculous they may be rendered upon forensic examination.
Escaping the Grip of the Past: As Violet constantly flits around and makes odd requests to the waitstaff, Henry can’t help but assume that she really isn’t quite yet in the right frame of mind for romance. He suggests that they try this another time, but since she really needs him to say, she tries the gambit of explaining that she’s been distracted because her abusive ex still has her in her grip. It may not be the immediate reason that her mind is elsewhere, but it’s not like it’s not true. What follows is a genuine, thoughtful conversation about how abuse warps our sense of reality. I wasn’t expecting Drop to be so astutely therapeutic, but I certainly appreciate it. It all adds up to a simple trick for effective storytelling: clearly establish your main characters’ backstories, and then treat their psychology with respect.

Drop is Recommended If You Like: Red Eye probably (I’ve never seen it in its entirety, but based on chatter I’ve heard, the comparison fits), Hitchcock thrillers about protagonists who suddenly find themselves in over their heads (Rear Window, North by Northwest, etc.), The Invisible Man

Grade: 4 out of 5 Threats

Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton Get ‘Freaky,’ and a Bloody Silly Time Will Be Had By All

November 11, 2020

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Freaky (CREDIT: Brian Douglas/Universal Pictures)

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Celeste O’Connor, Misha Osherovich, Uriah Shelton, Alan Ruck

Director: Christopher Landon

Running Time: 101 Minutes

Rating: R for Stunningly Over-the-Top Gore and Bluntly Disturbing Profanity

Release Date: November 13, 2020 (Theaters)/December 4, 2020 (On Demand)

When the elevator pitch for a movie is “A serial killer swaps bodies with a teenage girl,” how could its title be anything other than “Freaky Friday the 13th”? Maybe litigiousness was a concern, or perhaps brevity really is the soul of witty knifeplay, as co-writer/director Christopher Landon and company ultimately settled on the shorter moniker Freaky for this breezy and deadly concoction. Landon is best known for mashing up slashers and time loops in Happy Death Day and its sequel, and now he’s got another unlikely complement for his preferred horror subgenre. The hallmarks of the two formulas mix together mostly seamlessly, as mystical mumbo-jumbo and a race to a point-of-no-return countdown are punctuated by buckets of gore.

The teenage girl in question is Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton), who’s been going through life in a bit of a daze ever since her dad died about a year ago, while the serial killer (Vince Vaughn) is known as the Blissfield Butcher, and that’s pretty much all you need to know about him. Freaky‘s slasher approach is most directly inspired by the Friday the 13th franchise, particularly the early sequels in which the be-masked Jason Voorhees’ motivation gradually drifts away from revenge and more towards a general unquenchable thirst for killing. For Newton, that means playing the Butcher in Millie’s body as mostly a silent stalker, while occasionally dropping piercingly vulgar threats of violence. If the Butcher is motivated by anything, it’s shiny objects, as he is positively entranced by a beautiful kitchen knife, while his fashion sense leads him to outfit Millie’s body in a striking blood-red jacket.

Vaughn has a much more effervescent role to play, which he tackles with a level of relish that is always ready to be tapped whenever he’s given the right material. With arms akimbo and his heart on his sleeve, he nails the looseness of someone who suddenly finds herself a foot taller and about one hundred pounds bigger. Millie’s fascination with all the nooks, crannies, and appendages of her new body is infectious and an inspiration for all of us to celebrate the vessels we’re currently living in, body swap or no. Good on Vaughn for being so fully up for anything!

As for the actual story, Freaky lacks the emotional oomph present in the best of the body swap genre (or the best of the slasher genre, certainly). The thematic heft of the body swap tends to be driven by the swappers ultimately coming to an understanding with each other, but that’s not exactly going to work when one of them is basically an embodiment of pure evil. So we must be sated by the goofball charm, of which there is plenty, and the absurd graphic violence, of which there is even more. Landon is clearly here to revel in the most baroque excesses of the slasher world, as the Butcher utilizes the likes of a toilet seat and a tennis racket in profoundly lethal ways. Also there’s apparently a cryogenic chamber in a high school locker room. All that AND there’s a “Que Sera Sera” needledrop. Quite frankly, I think Freaky knows exactly who its audience is.

Freaky is Recommended If You Like: Friday the 13th Parts 3 through 6, Grindhouse-style gore, The continued relevance of Vince Vaughn

Grade: 3 out of 5 Magic Daggers

Movie Review: ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Repeats Everything, But Nothing Was Ever the Same

February 12, 2019

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CREDIT: Universal Pictures

Starring: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Phi Vu, Suraj Sharma, Sarah Yarkin, Ruby Modine, Rachel Matthews, Steve Zissis

Director: Christopher Landon

Running Time: 100 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Comically Absurd Death Scenes

Release Date: February 13, 2019

Happy Death Day 2U is a tricky movie to review while avoiding spoilers, because a lot of the fun is derived from the glut of surprises that the plot has in store. That may sound unlikely for a sequel to a film about someone repeating the same day over and over again. But it is true that one of 2U‘s great strengths is its unpredictability. In that sense, it is most reminiscent of The Cabin in the Woods, which is similarly impossible to talk about without spoiling at least a tad. But also like Cabin, Happy Death Day 2U is so chock-a-block full of twists that it is impossible to spoil entirely. So even if you go in knowing the first twist, there are about twenty-five more waiting for you, which is quite an accomplishment for any sequel. I will try to be as non-specific as possible for the rest of this review, but if you want to be thoroughly unspoiled, stop here and just know that 2U succeeds wildly in its go-for-broke mentality. (But if anyone wants to get deeper into the details, please feel free to send a comment my way because I happy to talk about this movie as much as possible.)

The challenge of any time loop narrative is making each successive go-round interesting instead of frustrating in its sameness. That pitfall would seem exponentially more challenging for a sequel. As the person who has to live it, Tree Gelbman is suitably enraged, perhaps even deranged, about being stuck in the predicament she thought she had just escaped. It plays to Jessica Rothe’s comic strengths to be able to just scream at the forces of fate torturing her. But it turns out that this same loop is just different enough for Tree and the audience to be optimistic. The tone shifts from the original so significantly, in fact, that 2U is essentially in an entirely different genre than its predecessor (to say which genre would constitute a spoiler). In that way, it is like Aliens, which shifted from the one-by-one elimination horror of Alien into a war-style action flick. That change was understandable given the succession from Ridley Scott to James Cameron. But in this case, Christopher Landon stayed on as director (while also taking over scripting duties from Scott Lobdell). That diverse tonal skillset is heartening to see in any filmmaker, and it makes me believe that the Happy Death Day franchise could actually pull off a third entry that is hinted at the end here.

Other highlights include beefing up the best parts of the first film. Tree gets wrung through an even more outrageous death montage, this time involving electrocution, skydiving in a bikini, and falling from a clock tower (in a possible nod to another time-based franchise). Meanwhile, Tree’s sorority sister Danielle is even more fleshed out as her own singular brand of clueless. Rachel Matthews has only a few credits to her name, but she deserves to be a star based on her Happy Death Day performances alone. With all this surplus of beef, 2U is perhaps a little busy. The slasher aspects might actually be unnecessary, though they do provide ample tension. Overall, this film has such a strong intellectual foundation for something so cheeky and demented that any slight misstep is easily forgiven once the next mind-tickling idea comes along.

Happy Death Day 2U is Recommended If You Like: Happy Death Day, Back to the Future Part II, Primer, Rick and Morty

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Loops

This Is a Movie Review: The Paradox of Life is That a ‘Happy Death Day’ Makes a Happy Birthday Worth Celebrating

October 12, 2017

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CREDIT: Universal Pictures

This review was originally published on News Cult in October 2017.

Starring: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Ruby Modine, Rachel Matthews, Charles Aitken, Rob Mello

Director: Christopher B. Landon

Running Time: 96 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Cheekiness Towards Violence and Sex

Release Date: October 13, 2017

Legitimately great remakes can come from both good or bad originals. The key is to offer a fresh spin. Happy Death Day is not officially a remake of Groundhog Day, but the influence is obvious (and cheekily acknowledged within the narrative). So I can believe that this new splashy horror flick was conceived as a redo of the Bill Murray time loop classic but with a slasher spin, and if indeed it was, that reveals a lot about why it succeeds as well as it does.

The film jolts into its adrenaline-fueled default as college student Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe, probably best known as the roommate in the green dress from La La Land) shoots awake on the morning of her birthday in an unfamiliar bed after a night of blacked out debauchery. The day ends with her stabbed to death by a killer in a creepy baby mask (which is inexplicably also the school mascot). But it’s her lucky day, or her eternally unlucky day, as she then wakes up in the same spot on the same date and meets her demise all over again, and then comes back to life again and repeats it all for an endless cycle of death and rebirth. But living like a phoenix ain’t so fire when you’re stuck in an eternal loop of cattiness, superficiality, and a refusal to confront lasting emotional pain.

Tree’s story matches up with that of Phil Connors not just in terms of mechanics but also spiritually. Ultimately, Groundhog Day is about the path to becoming a better person by unavoidably being confronted with past mistakes. Happy Death Day’s purpose is very much the same, surprisingly so for its genre but undeniably so regardless. A little more specifically, it examines how the ever-lingering possibility of death can spur someone on to living her best life by being the best possible version of herself. Death also has a major presence in Groundhog Day, but mostly on the edges (Phil’s resets don’t require him to bite it); in Happy Death Day, it is writ large.

Grief and loss loom uncomfortably in Tree’s life. Her mother, with whom she shared a birthday, passed away a few years earlier, and she has refused to really confront her lingering emptiness. Instead, she hides behind drinking, random hookups, and catty banter with her sorority sisters. Initially, she comes off as a typical slasher archetype: the superficial queen bitch whose demise the audience craves. But the loop is utilized to crack away at that cliché and uncover the genuine person underneath, allowing the audience to instead fall in love with her.

If this all sounds unwelcomingly weighty, it should be noted that the emotional import is handled efficiently and entertainingly enough that it does not get in the way of the wildly intense horror camp. The rating may be PG-13, but there is little restraint in the dialogue’s colorfulness. Scott Lobdell’s witty script displays influence from the likes of Mean Girls, Heathers, nighttime soaps, and other self-aware horror films. A few choice lines include “Would you please stop staring at me like I took a dump on your mom’s head?” or surmising that déjà vu means that “someone’s thinking of you while they’re masturbating.” Even sillier outbursts like, “Show your face, you pussy!” earn their stripes with the power of convicted delivery.

Happy Death Day wisely leaves out any prosaic explanation about why Tree is stuck in the loop. There is some exploration about how the injuries of each death carry over into the new repeated day, but that thread is ultimately discarded. Focusing on that element only when it is useful is a bit of a cheat, but an understandable one. From a mystery standpoint, Happy Death Day is much better at investigating the killer’s identity than it is at examining metaphysics. Like a lot of great twisty thrillers, the narrative leads you right to the culprit but then swerves into a detour. It is enough to make you hysterically scream right along with Tree at the big philosophical questions of a life gone topsy-turvy.

Happy Death Day is Recommended If You Like: Scream crossed with Mean Girls but wish both of those films had been influenced by Groundhog Day

Grade: 3.75 out of 5 Tylenols