Review: ‘You’re Next’

“You’re Next” is a halfway decent horror movie, which means people think it’s generally a great movie, that’s how low the bar is set for horror films, a genre riddled with no-budgeted, poorly acted, storyless, pointless hackjobs that try to pass themselves off as actual movies. “You’re Next,” however, isn’t that bad, as it sort of has a story and maybe it has a point? It didn’t make me want my time back, that’s for sure. So that’s something.

“You’re Next” is a home invasion movie and after watching a decent number of these types of films now, I think I can say I am not much of a fan of this subgenre of horror. Much like movies “Straw Dogs,” “The Purge,” “Funny Games,” “High Tension” and “The Strangers,” some people are inside a house, and murderous assholes want to hurt them, sometimes for completely unknown reasons, and sometimes for no reason (which is ANNOYING and the pinnacle of pointless storytelling). At least in “You’re Next” there turns out to be a reason for the home invasion, and a terrifyingly mundane one at that.*

So in this particular movie, a family reunited for their parents’ anniversary, and their first evening together, they get attacked by people wearing masks and wielding crossbows and axes and other such stabby and pointy weapons. The people in the house get picked off one at a time, but one person inside the house has her own mundane secret that enables her to fight back and cause problems for the home invaders. There is a point, much like in the end of “Skyfall,” when this movie turns into grown up “Home Alone.” This does include one cool little part where a booby trap is set up and then it takes quite a while for someone to trigger it, so for a long time I was trying to figure out who would get hit with that trap, and that was kind of fun.

On the other hand, the whole thing with the words you’re next being written in blood on walls and windows and shit really doesn’t play out in any way at all. As a matter of fact, when the family sees these words on a wall for the first time, the entire family sees it, so it is not apparent who the “you” in the statement is supposed to be. Would have been more interesting if they saw the messages one at a time, and then died in that order, that would have added a more “oh shit, things are getting serious!” vibe as the messages turn out to be right and those people do die in the order they see the message, but NOPE, not in this movie! Even though that’s the title and they use it a couple of times, in the end it has NOTHING to do with NOTHING. So that’s just great.

Otherwise, here’s another movie with people getting stabbed and axed and crossbowed to death, with plenty of blood and gore to appease die hard horror fans and to turn off the squeamish, and it is photographed nicely and put together well so it has the outward appearance of a competently made movie, which again, is not a given in this genre of filmmaking. They seemed to try to break some conventions and tropes and do something new with all of this but then came up short of the genre deconstruction and reinvention that made “Scream” so famous and “The Cabin in the Woods” so much fun.

There really isn’t much else to say about this thing. Horror fans will like it (and DO like it, and very much so) but I don’t really see the appeal for non-fans of the genre. Even as a movie about a dysfunctional family, it offers nothing interesting or deep in that regard, so the less said about that aspect the better. Just like 99% of horror movies (and really of all movies in general), this one will be forgotten by everyone except for the most die hard, ardent fans, who will likely lap up the surely inevitable direct-to-video or VOD sequel.

*For the record, I am a fan “Straw Dogs” but not the awful remake which missed the point of the original, and I appreciate Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” more than I actually like them (since he directed the original and the Americanized shot-for-shot remake), but all that other shit can take a flying leap.