Ever since the beloved and still hilarious In Living
Color comedian Marlon Wayans and star of parody films like Don’t Be a
Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and the first
two Scary Movie took on the unlikely dramatic turn of a scrappy street
rat in Darren Aronofsky’s completely horrifying Requiem for a Dream, he’s
become one of my favorite character actors.
Appearing over the years in other such renowned critical fare as Sofia
Coppola’s On the Rocks as well as the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect
while still doing his parody film with a sixth Scary Movie iteration
planned, he’s a multifaceted talent who can lean into any role’s demands.
When I heard Wayans, clearly no stranger to horror, was
attached to the psychedelic black football sports horror film Him from Jordan
Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and saw the actor in a terrifying teaser trailer
of him Whiplash-ing a young fresh blood into fiercely carved out physical
shape, naturally I got excited. After
viewing the film, I can confirm Marlon is the best thing about it while Tyriq
Withers as the football trainee protagonist in what shapes up to be a David vs.
Goliath horror tale with more-than-overt Get Out leanings and tropes nearly
deep-sixes it all by himself. Really, we
haven’t had a stiff bad leading man of his kind since first seeing Karl Glusman
in Gaspar Noe’s erotic 3D drama Love.
A shame because he undoes the great pathway to Hell’s heart laid out by
Wayans and Peele in this.
Years after witnessing his childhood football hero Isaiah
White (Marlon Wayans) suffer a debilitating and horrific career-ending open fracture,
rising football star Cam (Tyriq Withers, himself a former wide receiver on the
Florida State Seminoles) sees history repeating itself when he is ambushed by a
cloaked figure and left with a life-threatening head-injury. Determined to stay afloat after dropping out
of training for the league combine, his agent Tom (Tim Heidecker from Tim
and Eric) points him towards an offer from his hero Isaiah to train with
him for a week at an elite yet remote desert fitness center and fortress with
the hopes of succeeding Isaiah’s throne.
He reluctantly accepts and at first is starstruck upon meeting Isaiah
but soon finds himself undergoing a bizarre and increasingly violent series of
training exercises including using a jugs machine in ways not meant for the human
body compounded with bullish headbutting.
Things get weirder when Cam discovers he’s being injected with Isaiah’s
blood which supposedly contains superhuman qualities and engenders a swath of
freakish hallucinations in the trainee.
Its only a matter of time before Isaiah’s wife Elsie (Julia Fox) begins
eerily seducing our hero followed by a confession at gunpoint from Isaiah which
feels less like jealousy and more like a carefully co-opted test.
Marlon Wayans is
terrific in the film, it goes without saying, but he’s stuck trying to prop up
a film and particularly a leading actor beneath him and the film implodes and
undoes much of Wayans’ gradual transformation into a pretty ferocious
beast. Tyriq Withers meets the physical
demands of the role having had experience in the football world himself but he’s
got a long way to go in the art of emoting for the camera.
The sports world is a
great hotspot for horror both bodily and psychologically and hopefully this
film will not be the nail in the coffin for more scary explorations of the ills
and endurances of physical training. It’s
a great loaded gun of an idea that never really goes off. In this instance, count the Monkeypaw team
down but never out!
--Andrew Kotwicki