Fresh (Mimi Cave, 2022)

Damn straight I was on the edge of my leather recliner at the climax of Fresh. But this is yet another awful horror film I've been suckered into watching, so insulting in its sloppiness that I rue the expenditure of time and emotional energy. The hook here is a supposed feminist reworking of misogynist 1980s slasher film tropes. So instead of one final girl, we get three although director Mimi Cave and/or Lauryn Kahn couldn't bear jettisoning the idiotic trope of "let's split up," not to mention the idiocy of the main character winding up in such a hideous situation in the first place. All of which might be forgivable if Cave/Kahn didn't waste our investment committing several Storytelling 101 errors at the end. An important secondary character peaces out in an act of insulting narrative convenience (and I'm being generous here - it's more baffling and random than anything). And one of the bad guy's lackeys is left unaccounted for as the end credits roll. Did Cave/Kahn forget he existed? Why was he included in the film if he served no narrative purpose? No one on the set or in preproduction brought this up? The oversight is not even used to amplify the horror in an unrealistic manner as with the rewind in Funny Games or the supernatural powers of Jason, Michael, Freddy, etc. There should be some sort of payoff for fear. In its absence, I'll gravitate towards more rewarding works of art such as the filmographies of Roberta Findlay and Doris Wishman, Birdemic: Shock and Terror (James Nguyen, 2010), and The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968) which I saw for the first time last weekend and oh. my. god.

Fresh: D