Mike Stec takes an early stab at OMG! We're In A Horror Movie.
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| So? What are we? Your two token black guys? How. Highly. Original. |
Meta-horror is a difficult sub-genre to get right. Too self-aware or over-the-top and you cross
the line fully into comedy; not enough and you're a straight formula horror
flick with no gimmick to set yourself apart.
The Scream films pioneered the carefully balanced formula that
meta-horror is built from, and 2012's brilliant The Cabin in the Woods took
it to the next level. Many other films
have tried to duplicate this formula, with wildly mixed results. The independent release OMG... We're In A
Horror Movie! Is the latest film to attempt to make its mark in this
growing field.
In OMG..., a group of friends get together for a
board game night, only to find themselves unwittingly thrust into a horror
film. Each member of the group then
scrambles to define their role in the film, in the hopes of ensuring their
survival. The premise itself is actually
pretty clever, and early scenes with the members of the group figuring out
which roles they play are quite entertaining.
The inexperienced young cast has great chemistry, playing off of each
other well, and just appears to be having a lot of fun with this silly little
movie that they're making.
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| Mirror mirror on the wall. Who's the chick in the bathroom stall? |
Unfortunately about halfway through the whole thing just
gets weird. Interesting ideas and
concepts make way for the kind of over-the-top ridiculousness that can easily
derail a movie like this. Characters
appear and disappear, motives become unclear, and clever plot devices hinted at
early in the movie never come to pass.
Luckily, the film avoids one of the cardinal sins of meta-horror, and
never feels smugly satisfied with its own cleverness. What it does instead is build itself an
interesting concept but never quite seems sure enough of itself to really know
where to take it. There is a lot of
potential in OMG..., but it kind of loses its way.
OMG... We're In A Horror Movie! had all the makings
of what could have been one of the more fun and interesting entries in the
sub-genre, and at first appeared to be headed that way. But in the end the film was a victim of its
own cleverness, though not so much being too clever for its own good as a lack
of depth to make up for its breadth of cool ideas. It's hard not to feel like writer/director
Ajala Bandele (who also plays AJ, one of the group of friends) may have been on
to something here, and with a little more development and experience it could
possibly have been something special.
Instead, OMG... is an unfortunate waste of the good ideas and
potential that made the first half of this movie so much fun. OMG... is like playing Catan with
only half a deck and one other friend: just enough to be kind of interesting,
but not nearly enough to be everything it could be.
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Score
-Mike Stec