YOU MIGHT BE THE KILLER (2018)

YOU MIGHT BE THE KILLER (2018)

Tagline: It's Summer Camp. What did you expect?

(Horror, Comedy, Another Love Letter to The 80s Slasher) [R]

Everyone is dead, or almost everyone.
Whoa. I mean, that sometimes happens, especially the camp counselors.

In this one camp counselor, Sam wakes up from being blacked out to find himself at a summer camp where he is drenched in blood and nearly everyone is dead. He calls his good friend Chuck who works at a comic book shop and is well-versed in horror flicks to help him piece together what happened. 

First off, this movie is definitely a love letter to the 80’s slasher as I stated above. It doesn’t get any more perfectly cliché than a summer camp scenario with camp counselors running for their lives. Now, let me be clear. If you want to see the best “ode to the 80’s slasher ever made”, this movie isn’t going to cut it. You need to seek out THE FINAL GIRLS for that. However, this one is pretty interesting and pretty well done given its intentions. 

So let’s get into the good first. I like that they cast Alyson Hannigan (FLORA & ULYSSES) for this thing. She is pretty much perfect in the role of Chuck (which is short for Charlotte). I also liked Brittany S. Hall (CAT RUN 2) who plays Imani. She kind of takes on the role that Paula had in THE FINAL GIRLS as the girl who takes no crap, only she gets far more screen time. So Imani was a better character overall than Paula was. We also get a fantastic performance out of the versatile Fran Kranz (from the dumpster fire THE CABIN IN THE WOODS). So performance wise this film just nails it. There are some other decent roles, but these 3 get by far the most screen time. The score is really solid and I do like the fact that this thing isn’t wildly gory. The slasher moments we got really did reflect the old-school cheesy stuff that the 80s mastered. I also loved that they had graphics pop up with what was going on etc. This was also a nice touch we got in some parts of THE FINAL GIRLS. 

Where this movie kind of goes off the rails is in the way it’s shot. Fine, you don’t want to tell your story straight forward. I get it. I can take it. What I can’t take is you telling your convoluted story in such a way that we are re-visiting certain sequences over and over in chopped-up fashion like it was edited by a pelican on crack. The ridiculously out-of-sequence nonsense we get in the flashbacks which are supposed to be there for clarity wasn’t clear. They drove me up the wall. The other problem was that this movie wasn’t all that imaginative when it came to the back story. One thing that really sets some of the older slasher movies of the 80s apart is that they spent time giving us some rich lore that provided a sense of motivation. This storyline kind of feels ripped off of “THE MASK” with Jim Carrey. I won’t go further into detail than this, but the lack of originality in at least giving us a cool credible backstory was problematic. Even something simple concerning the motive, like we got in THE FINAL GIRLS would have been more than adequate. This is not to say they didn’t give a backstory to the killer’s motives. I just didn’t like it at all. 

In spite of my many, many, issues with this film, it’s pretty close to a must-see for fans of the slasher “Let’s be camp counselors” horror fans. The comedy is more tongue-in-cheek than roll-around-on-the-floor type humor, but if you have seen a lot of horror flicks most of the humor lands. 

If you can get past the jumbled nightmare editing there is an interesting movie to be found here. The ending was a twist, but I didn’t necessarily love it. 

I give this one a 4 out of 7. It had a chance to be way better than it was right at its fingertips. If you are doing a Halloween horror movie marathon, this would be a decent entry, but nothing mind-blowing.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF CURMUGEON FILMS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.