A good movie

Well, I f*cked up here. Indeed, for some reason, I thought that ‘Pearl’ was the first movie in this franchise so I watched it first. On the other hand, since it was a prequel, it wasn’t a big deal after all. Anyway, it had been about 10 years since Ti West had delivered a horror flick but he definitely came up with something intriguing with this franchise, that’s for sure. In fact, recently, I had watched a whole bunch of ‘Friday the 13th’ movies and all these movies looked so cheap and displayed such weak performances. Here, it was a whole different kind of ball game and you could clearly see the progress such slasher flicks have made during the last 40 years. In this case, I loved the convincing vibe they delivered for this late 70’s period (it was also funny that it was all shot in New Zealand when it was actually taking place in Texas) and the whole thing was visually pretty neat. The cast was also really good here. The stand-out was obviously Mia Goth who actually finally had her breakthrough with this franchise. She was pretty good as Maxine but, above all, she was downright fascinating as Pearl (the fact that I first saw the prequel maybe paid off after all). It was also pretty neat to see Jenna Ortega at only 20 years old and she probably played the 2nd most interesting character. I wish they did spend more time explaining why this young girl became so fascinated by this whole porn thing though but it was obviously not the point of this movie. However, the biggest surprise was Brittany Snow. I think I have known this actress for about 20 years and I always thought she was cute but rather boring and uninteresting but she actually impressed me here. Indeed, it was just a daring choice for someone who had been in the industry for so long but I think she really disappeared in her character, even if she could have been more developed but that’s something that could be said about all the characters. Eventually, the weakest link from the bunch was Martin Henderson who was actually not bad but it felt that they didn’t manage to get Matthew McConaughey for this role so they got the cheap version instead. Eventually, did Ti West really exploit the potential of this concept? I’m not really sure. I think this trilogy might better work as a whole then by taking each movie separately. Anyway, to conclude, it turned out to be a solid slasher flick and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

7/10