Dir. Haline Reijn (2022)
A group of teens throwing a hurricane party find one of their friends dead, leading to a night of paranoia and murder.
Gen Z horror has more than entered the mainstream, filling the genre with tons of stories about the latest generation and all of their weird (and often annoying) idiosyncrasies. While this has annoyed a good portion of the audience to no end, I personally don't hate it. Sure, a lot of times they're eye-rollingly inclusive or filled with the latest and most arbitrarily ridiculous slang, but it's wonderful that the most inclusive genre is including a new generation that can help grow its fanbase even more. As new generations grow and attain a larger share of the adult population, it's only natural that their tastes and traits begin to become more represented in media writ large. And despite these views of mine, which put me on the opposite side of a lot of the horror faithful... I avoided Bodies Bodies Bodies until just now because it seemed unbearably obnoxious.
A group of friends get together to throw a hurricane party, in which they drink, insult each other, and play a sounds-fun-but-often-results-in-violence game called Bodies Bodies Bodies. In the game, which takes place in the dark, one person will be tagged as a murderer and will "kill" a random member of the group, and when the lights come back on, the rest of the group tries to identify the murderer. It's a fairly straightforward party game, but when bodies start dropping for real, things go a bit off the rails. Will the group survive the storm, or will the atmosphere inside the house become more deadly than the raging winds and rain outside?
Don't get me wrong: Bodies Bodies Bodies is absolutely annoying. The teens are almost universally unlikeable and it's difficult to root for anybody but the killer. The paranoid atmosphere of the film is fairly well done, however, and it's got an incredibly inventive ending that, while I guessed it at around the halfway point, still feels like a fresh idea that is perfectly executed. The movie is pretty fun, and though it ignores a lot of the gore that could have elevated it beyond the stereotypical teen horror that its, it's much better than I expected. While there are a bunch of movies that seek to take advantage of the Gen Z crowd, Bodies Bodies Bodies feels like it completely encompasses the mannerisms of the entire generation: it's mean people being mean to each other, and every character is as vapid and hateable as possible.
Whether that's a good thing or not will depend on your personal taste, though a movie where the audience wants every cast member to die is not unique to this film and shouldn't, by itself, dissuade you from watching it. Of course, despite the movie's decent payoff, it's a film that will automatically alienate a lot of its potential older audience. That's not particularly unexpected, as the previous generations almost always hate the newest one. It is, however, always an interesting choice for filmmakers: do you appeal to the up-and-comers, knowing that if you make a generational hit you already have a built-in audience? Or do you try to appeal to the general public, knowing that in sheer numbers they are the greater volume of people? It's an intriguing choice, one that I don't know that I'd particularly want to be faced with, but suffice to say that the producers of Bodies Bodies Bodies leaned heavily into the former. And it's a shame, too, because it's a rather creative movie that would have likely gotten a lot more buzz if it wasn't dedicated to crowds that think Pete Davidson is funny.
He's not. Pete Davidson isn't funny. He is, however, actually pretty decent in this flick. If you've been avoiding watching because you hate the younger crowd, you might be doing yourself a disservice, even if you're right.
Who this movie is for: Younger horror fans, Teen horror lovers, Drug addicts
Bottom line: Bodies Bodies Bodies is much better than I thought it would be while being perhaps even more annoying than I expected. The Gen Z crowd may be obnoxious, but the horror that has been targeted to them so far is almost as good as the ones we grew up with. While this flick won't be for everyone and definitely pulls a few punches that it shouldn't, it's an interesting paranoia-themed horror with an ending that is one of the more creative in recent memory. If you can get past the Pete Davidson of it all, I definitely recommend checking it out, and it's streaming for free on Netflix right now.
