Review: FREAKY

Before we get to the credit sequence we get a title WEDNESDAY in white letters and THE 11th in blood red. A group of middle class American teens are playing while the parents are out. They mention the urban myth of a local killer before splitting up and meeting that very figure who dispatches the lot of them and takes the magic looking dagger in the display case. THURSDAY the 12th, young final girl Millie wakes, blows a kiss to the poster of the hunky pop star beside her bed and springs out to greet the day. Sister's a cop and mum drinks but there does seem a little warmth left from Dad's passing. Off to school where we see her swarmed by mean girls, exchange looks with her secret crush, exchange bitchiness with her teacher and take refuge in her friends, black girl, gay boy. Later, after humiliation as the football mascot of the unbelievably named Beavers football team, she farewells her friends, is pursued by the masked killer, taken to a football field which is also a Mayan pyramid where he plunges the magic dagger into her shoulder. But the moon has vanished behind a cloud and skews the lot of it. After a lightning bolt she's him and he's her. She wakes up in her room the next morning and it's Freaky Friday the 13th. Ok, the movie has already made that joke but it's still a good one.

So, he reaches a rapid understanding that his chosen profession of slasher is only helped by this switch as it grants him access that his big lunky Vince Vaughan body forbade. She wakes as him in an atrocity decorated broken down mill trapped in the kind of self disgust that her beauty might have kept at bay. You'll get the plot from here. I don't really need to spoil it but I don't spoil.

What you also get is one of Blumhouse's clever outings like Happy Death Day or The Purge. It's not Get Out but it's also not overreaching. This horror comedy which veers more toward fun than thrills does have a personal story of a girl with issues but it also keeps the pace up and the suspense mostly dialled high enough to convince. Thankfully, the script keeps the self-referential camp out of the dialogue (mostly, that is, but the line "You're black! I'm gay! We are so dead!" is funny in action as much as typed out) though I counted more than a handful of visual winks. Then again, by now after the '80s slashers, the '90s post modern parodies of them and the flat minded copies of older titles grew exhausting there's not much left in the let's have fun with callbacks barrel. This film plays like it says on the tin as a mix of body switch and slasher.

And that's where it does get strong. When "Murder Barbie" acts in reaction to the rape culture around her it's not easy to tell why s/he is doing it except that the two forces of outward appearance and understanding of how it feels merge into a more visceral revulsion of the boy's entitlement and the violence that nurtures it. As Millie inside the Blissfield Butcher she exults in her newfound physical power to the point where the cruelty it allows disgusts her. The teen movie cliche scene of the newly madeover nerd girl making the boys go pop as she walks in slomo down the school hallway is charged with psychosis rather than attitude which does lend it a pleasant edge. There's a very interesting kiss and -- 

-- and I began to understand as I enjoyed that along with so much else about this that the lessons onscreen weren't preaching to me but a demographic I hadn't been in since the first Friday the 13th left me wide eyed and shaking in the cinema seat surrounded by friends on Schoolies' Week. So, it really didn't matter if I thought the gay is ok messaging met with my approval because there was no chance that it wouldn't. I immediately began to feel old and started shrinking in my seat. Except.

Except the best part of all of this stopped anything like that because I saw this movie IN A CINEMA! After almost an entire year in various degrees of lockdown, I bought a ticket online and fronted up and checked in and took my seat in a great big movie palace in central Melbourne (and Melbourne Central, just quietly) and with a choctop and a clear attention span. Early afternoon screening so the smaller audience was already scattered behind me. I turned off my phone and sat back, enjoying every last crappy ad and trailer and as the curtains widened for the feature and the lights went down I felt the same kind of smile that forces itself on to my face the moment the airliner soars to its ceiling and I am pushed back into the seat by the sheer force. So, yeah, the darker horror elements in this movie should have been darker and the warmth could have done with more comedy but this, this was fun. Again.