Always on the hunt for new and interesting horror movies, You’re Next caught my eye way back when they were airing the trailers for it on TV. I have always loved the thriller concept of trapped survivors being stalked by unknown assailants (Assault on Precinct 13 always comes to mind). The animal masks certainly sealed the deal, offering creepy-looking and unique killers that I thought looked awesome.
Fast forward to the present day, and You’re Next has finally made its way to the New Releases section on Netflix. As soon as I noticed the title on there, I had to play it. Remembering the excitement I had when I saw the trailer (between work and family life, I rarely actually make it to the cinema anymore), I was happy to now be able to watch the flick with the weird animal masks.
You’re Next actually got off to a slow start, making me question my choice of movie after a few minutes into it. All of the introduced characters seemed kind of bland, and as a result, I had trouble connecting with any of them right away. I decided to let the film continue so I could get to the killer sheep guy and see what he was all about.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait for too much longer before the carnage began. All of the characters, a large family, had gathered at a vacation home where tensions began to mount at the dinner table. Just as soon as you get to know who everybody is, let’s just say the house is attacked and the unseen killers quickly claim their first victim.
Again reminding me of Assault on Precinct 13, everyone alive in the house scrambles to get away from the windows to avoid any flying projectiles being shot at them. When the body count continues to rise, I surely felt an extra sense of horror with the group of victims being a family. It’s certainly horrific to imagine those you especially care about dying in such graphic ways right in front of you.
The suspense starts to build as the group desperately tries to come up with a plan for survival, after realizing their cellular phone signals have been blocked with a jammer. That means that these people, whoever they are, know exactly what they’re doing. Once I realized that the attack wasn’t random, I knew that there had to be more going on here, which made some of the later twists a bit more predictable.
The killers themselves did, in fact, look pretty creepy at first. Unfortunately, they lost some of their mojo with things like visible bald spots and some not-very-tough reactions to the pain they receive when the survivors begin to fight back. They start to come across more like the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, trying to sneak in and kill those inside, including one person who is surprisingly a much better fighter than any of them. Literally, some of the very same booby traps are even used.
You barely get halfway through the movie before you even see the faces of the killers and hear them talk, revealing who they are and their motives for being there. The mystery is completely gone by that point, but at least they didn’t save the big twist that came with that reveal for the end, since I had already predicted it in my head. Sadly, even with the cool masks, the killers were also no longer scary by now, especially since it seemed like they didn’t even stand a chance against the survivor who chose to fight back and had been doing a hell of a good job at it.
I also just couldn’t help but bury my face in my palm at the stupidity of the murderers. Even after their faces have already been seen, and their entire plan has been openly talked about and known by the survivor who is fighting back… THEY STILL CONTINUE TO WEAR THE ANIMAL MASKS AS THEY SEARCH FOR THEIR VICTIM. These bulky masks with very-small eyeholes, that have only served to hinder their every attack, were still being worn by those idiots, even though they had zero reason at that point to conceal their faces anymore. Shit, being that stupid, they deserved to fail.
The ending threw in a couple more twists for us, one of which I predicted and the other I hadn’t. It just didn’t matter anymore by that point, because while I was entertained enough to wait around and see what happened at the film’s climax, the suspense had fleeted long ago. I was happy to see cute animal masks being used by horror movie villains, but I feel that they lost much of their mojo once their faces and plans were revealed. While the movie was surely better than many of the cheesy horror titles you’ll come across on Netflix, it’s probably not good enough to warrant a re-watch and at the end of the day, I’d just give it 3 stars out of 5.
The Jeremy Dick 