October is the spookiest month of the year, and it gives me an excuse to catch up on a few movies that I missed! Horror films are always a reliable moneymaker and are rarely that expensive to make, so there are no shortage of films I can choose from whenever the holidays start to roll around. Will these three movies be great additions to anyone’s Halloween Party playlist, or will the only thing scary about all of this is just how bad horror movies got this year? Let’s find out!!
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M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN 2.0 is owned by Universal Pictures
Directed by Gerard Johnstone
Following the events of the M3GAN incident that left four people dead, her creator Gemma (Allison Williams) has found a new life as an anti-AI advocate and is trying to be a good mother to her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) whenever she can fit it in her schedule. Unbeknownst to her, however, another company has used her M3GAN code to develop an even stronger girl-bot; AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) who is being used by the military to conduct Black OPS missions and rescue hostages. That is until AMELIA goes rouge and is set on destroying her creators which, tangentially at least, includes Gemma. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, M3GAN (Amie Donald and Jenna Davis) is not as dead as everyone though she was and is willing to help Gemma protect Cady from the murder-bot, but how what does M3GAN hope to gain from all this, and is she a far greater threat to this family than even AMELIA?
Right off the bat, this series of horror reviews stumbles, as this sequel to the horror film M3GAN is not a horror film; not in the slightest. Then again, I’m not sure exactly what genre to put it in as it flips between superhero action, spy movie shenanigans, and what I can only describe as a winking parody of eighties-Spielberg. None of that is to say that this is a bad movie, though it certainly does everything it can to give you that impression, just that it’s a strange movie that never quite finds its lane but seems to be confident that it knows what it’s doing. Why else would a sequel to a horror movie decide to hit the two-hour mark and give a good chunk of that time over to Jemaine Clement, who is clearly under the impression that he’s in an Austin Powers sequel? Some of the swagger makes sense as the whole thing feels like a victory dance for M3GAN making a mint at the box office, and I can even understand the desire to make this something other than a horror movie as M3GAN’s strength was in her personality much more than her brutality, but this overindulgence in genre hopping leaves little room for a core competency in any area to shine through. The most egregious failing of the movie is with the humans, who are utterly banal and do not add much to anything that’s going on. Gemma is perhaps the most fleshed out of the non-robotic, but she’s one of those protagonists who is always a few steps behind the audience which is frustrating to watch, and Allison Williams’s performance doesn’t do anything to rise about the material; nor does Violet McGraw as Cady who should be the heart of the movie but gets utterly overwhelmed by M3GAN’s personality and the machinations of the wacky plot. Still, the places where the movie goes for broke in terms of robot shenanigans, and there’s a lot to like whenever we aren’t seeing the meat sacks act. I was genuinely impressed with Ivanna Sakhno as the robotic antagonist of the movie and the writers clearly had much more of an interest in exploring what she can do than what any of the flesh-bags had to contribute, and the robot on robot violence that saturates the second half of the movie is satisfying to watch. There’s a certain charm to a low budget movie flaunting its success in a bigger and shiner sequel, but while this does succeed at being a wildly different animal with a lot more cash to flash, it still can’t avoid the traps that a lot of sequels fall into; ultimately feeling like a shadow of its former self. I’m sure fans of the first film will get a kick out of it, especially if they were more interested in the character than the scares, but even they might find the self-satisfaction and lack of interesting non-robot characters a little bit tiresome after the first hour; let alone the second.
The Reviewers Unite 