This feature covers movies that we don't have the will to pull the plug on but are so dreadful, silly or boring that we grab the remote and start zipping through scenes just to get it over with:
THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (D+) - In this horror story, three young actress tragically fall victim to an over-eager first-time director who slashes through his obvious influences as if with a dull hunting knife.
Very little makes sense here in the story of a pair of monosyllabic girls stranded at their girls school when their parents fail to show up to pick them up on the last day before break, for various cryptic reasons. Poor Kiernan Shipka (little Sally on TV's "Mad Men") plays Kat, a brooding little freak who gives the creeps to her older classmate, Rose (Lucy Boynton), a raven-haired beauty about to break some bad news to her boyfriend. The Northeastern prep school comes complete with the avuncular headmaster and a few mean old-crone teachers, all of whom are just begging to be slaughtered in some hideous fashion.
Kat's behavior is unsettling, and the movie starts with her picturing her parents in a deadly car crash, a premonition that she comes back to repeatedly as her mental state deteriorates. Meantime, a third girl, who goes by Joan (Emma Roberts), has apparently been sprung from a mental institution and hitches a ride with an unsuspecting couple who, it turns out, claim to be the parents of a girl who looks just like Rose and who -- get this -- died nine years ago!
OK. We're catching on. This isn't going to end well. It's just a matter of which of these three mopes is going to out-crazy the others. Just a few minutes in, I turned on the subtitles, because I don't speak Depressed Millennial, and I could barely make out what these poor girls were saying.
In the hands of Oz Perkins (who made this in 2015 before he made "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House" last year), this cliche-ridden story -- complete with creaky doors in seemingly every room and swelling ominous background music -- is devoid of originality. The debts to "Twin Peaks" and the "Exorcist" are huge. (There's actually an exorcism scene toward the end.) Perkins also has a disturbing leer when he gazes through the camera. In one scene, Joan, who is crashing in a motel in a room separate from the couple she just met, for some inexplicable reason answers the door in just a towel when she knows it's the husband knocking -- and lets him in for a casual chat.
There's a reason we don't watch horror movies anymore. Once you've seen a few, you've seen them all. These films are big lately -- they are popular and cheap to make. These three young actresses have seen better scripts and done better work before; they shouldn't have to be this director's ghoulish playthings.
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