Freaky (2020)

½ star
Freaky is so bad it makes me want to watch The Hot Chick all over again even though I didn't care for Rob Schneider's lame body switching movie. Just when this genre has seemingly run its course, along comes another filmmaker who thinks he can revive it. The guilty party this time is Christopher Landon, the writer/director of the decent Happy Death Day series. His attempt to meld the body switching movie with horror and comedy is a disaster. More than that, it's pitiful. The opening kills were badly staged and completely unfunny, and it's all downhill from there. The plot involves an ancient dagger that can cause the attacker and victim to switch bodies. Landon's stab at the concept involves switching members of the opposite sex, an idea that has been explored only a handful of times, but I've never really seen a movie mine this scenario to its fullest potential. The one that I think did it the best was 2006's It's a Boy Girl Thing. I already mentioned Rob Schneider's middling comedy, which focused too much on Rachel McAdams in Schneider's body and not the other way around.

The movie represents a low point in the career of Vince Vaughn, who plays a serial killer known as the Blissful Butcher. Vaughn has done a lot of comedy, but he has played menacing before. (He was not the worst thing about Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake.) He is asked to do both here by starting out as a killer whose body becomes inhabited by high schooler Millie (Kathryn Newton), whom he tried to kill while she was waiting for a ride home after a football game. Millie wakes up the next day in the butcher's body, so now Vaughn is going through the motions previously laid out by Rob Schneider by acting feminine and discovering what it's like to urinate standing up. That is the nature of body switching movies. Jamie Lee Curtis and Judge Reinhold have been there and done that, but they didn't embarrass themselves because they benefited by playing grown up versions of a girl and a boy, respectively, in straight comedies. Vaughn finds himself in an oddly disjointed movie that has him prancing around and wagging his penis in the bathroom stall while elsewhere a teacher is sawed in half courtesy of the butcher in Millie's body.

The best horror comedies are not two distinct movies. They blend the two to the point that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. I always cite The Return of the Living Dead and Re-Animator when making comparisons. They were funny because they incorporated humor into their horror stories. In the former, our heroes panic when the boss drives a pickaxe into a zombie's skull, and it doesn't die. The boss then upgrades to a hacksaw. This scene is hilarious, but it's also gruesome and horrific because everyone's reaction is based on logic. This is exactly how people would react when a naked zombie refuses to die. Scary Movie was a horror parody, but it never tried to be scary. Freaky goes back and forth between its two personalities like a violent tennis match. There are plentiful helpings of gore, but the movie never sustains any kind of dread because after a brutal killing, we're right back with Millie in the butcher's body going for comedy and talking with a girly voice.

Millie seeks out help from her two friends Nyla (Celeste O'Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich). It takes some effort to recruit their help, but Millie successfully convinces them by doing a cheer and answering questions to which only she would know the answer. Elsewhere in the school, the butcher in Millie's body tosses a mean girl into a freezing chamber and turns the temperature all the way down, turning her into solid ice. These scenes illustrate exactly what is wrong with this picture. We veered wildly from a comedic scene featuring Vince Vaughn doing a cheer (his remark in Dodgeball about male cheerleaders comes to mind) to a ghastly murder using a cryotherapy chamber that was inexplicably capable of reaching dangerously low temperatures with no safety mechanisms in place to prevent death. This is a movie without suspense, laughs (okay, there was a comment about sandpaper that I liked) and common sense.

Later, Millie and her friends discover that the butcher must stab her again before time runs out or else they will permanently inhabit each other's body. Along the way, Landon treats us to a kissing scene between Vaughn and Uriah Shelton (playing Booker, Millie's crush). Booker is not gay, but he’s part of a point Landon wants to make about how attraction transcends biological sex. It’s all about what’s inside, you see. I think Landon is trying to give us what Ghost was unable to do back in 1990, which was feature a kiss between Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. That movie, though, firmly developed the relationship between Sam (Patrick Swayze) and Molly (Moore), so we understood how they felt about each other. If that scene happened the way it should have, it would have worked. Booker and Millie have no time to develop any chemistry between them, so this scene exists for the message itself and without context. Freaky is total garbage. Landon is not untalented, so I have hope that he will produce something much better than this in the future.

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