Where The Scary Things Are Review

Where The Scary Things Are review.

A competently made film about the worst teens on the planet being unlikable for 90 minutes. Where The Scary Things Are doesn’t know the answer to its own statement. Where the people you can’t wait to get what’s coming are…that one it knows.

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Where The Scary Things Are

Directed by B. Harrison Smith

Written by B. Harrison Smith

Starring Selina Flanscha, Peter Cote and Paul Cottman

Where The Scary Things Are Review

Horror movies often make the mistake of creating completely unlikable characters. The hope is that you’ll want to see them get brutally murdered. Where the Scary Things Are gives us those characters in spades. It then fails to deliver kill scenes worth the wait.

The worst people you’ve ever seen on film are tasked by their high school teacher to make a fake urban legend and see how it gains traction. When they stumble upon an actual one…they tie it up and build a new mythology around it. After nearly an hour and a half of insufferable behavior their monster gets loose.

Where the Scary Things Are gives us one lead character, out of a large group, that we are supposed to like. We are meant to care about him solely because he isn’t as annoying or sadistic as his friends. He does stand by for their horrible behavior for far too long so care about him if you can. He’s the most likable of the horrible characters.

Everyone else is just the dirt worst. They blackmail students and teachers. They set sleeping homeless people on fire. Eventually their ringleader Ayla (Selina Flanscha) starts to feed people to the monster. Sometimes just because she doesn’t like them. These are the main characters of Where the Scary Things Are. We spend the entire movie watching their debauchery.

These people are so unlikable that even if they had a proper comeuppance it wouldn’t be enough to justify the length of time we spend with them. Unfortunately, Where the Scary Things Are doesn’t even get close to delivering worthwhile pay back. Obvious budget constraints are at play here, but it is flat out brutal how uninspiring the death scenes in this movie are.

The movie looks good enough until the director tries to put any style onto the screen. One of the effects of great equipment becoming so affordable is that anyone can make a good-looking move now. It isn’t until they try to show off their creative vision that you can be sure you’re watching garbage. The climax of Where the Scary Things Are sees the director try to flex his artistic muscle with coloring and lighting. This is where the movie stops looking good and starts looking like a confusing mess.

In fairness, I believe it was done to distract from how lackluster the bloody payback will be. It makes sense. Smoke and mirrors are cheaper than gore effects. On a basic level, the director understands that the third act needs to be bigger. The problem isn’t with the inability to deliver the gore you want…it’s in creating these horrible characters in the first place.

When you don’t like any of the people in the story…and you can’t deliver on watching their destruction…you’ve got real problems. If more care had been put into developing someone to latch on to and care about, the first 2/3rds of the movie wouldn’t be so aggravating. And you’d have someone to root for in the final act instead of waiting for big death scenes that aren’t coming.

For what it’s worth, the creature actually looks fairly good. There are a small handful of fun moments. They’re too few and far between to add up to a recommendation to watch. To make matters worse, the setting of the movie is an amusement park during the offseason. The poster promises a horror movie set around thrill rides. What we get is a movie that takes place in a dirty shack on the grounds of the park. Another failed promise.

Scare Value

Where The Scary Things Are is a movie about terrible people. That doesn’t disqualify it from being a good movie. It does that itself by giving us little to care about for far too long. When the time comes for the horrible characters to get what they deserve the movie fails to deliver the level of mayhem and kill scenes it should. Death scenes are so ineffective that they may as well have been explained with a title card that reads: “so and so is now dead”. To its credit, the movie mostly looks good. We can chalk that up to technology, not craft. An easy thumbs down for this review of Where the Scary Things Are.

1.5/5