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Mario Bautista, has been with the entertainment industry for more than 4 decades. He writes regular columns for People's Journal and Malaya.

Feb 16, 2021

REVIEW OF AMAZON PRIME MOVIE ‘FREAKY’, A HORROR-COMEDY THAT COMBINES 'FREAKY FRIDAY' WITH 'FRIDAY THE 13TH'

 















‘FREAKY’ is an Amazon Prime horror-comedy that is a combination of the hit comedy “Freaky Friday”, where a mom and her daughter switched bodies, and “Friday the 13th”, a slasher film franchise where a masked killer ruthlessly murders his victims. 


It is from Christopher Landon, who directed the hit horror-comedies “Happy Death Day” 1 and 2.


In the opening scene, four randy teenagers are quickly murdered by a masked killer known as the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who loves slaughtering high school kids. 


The murders take place in an old mansion where the Butcher steals a mystical dagger called La Dola. 


The movie then shifts its focus on Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”), a high school student who’s bullied by the mean girls and the hunky jocks in their campus. 


Her dad had just died. her mom has turned alcoholic and she hasn’t moved on from the tragedy. 


She has an older sister who is a cop, but it’s her best friends, Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and the gay Josh (Misha Osherovich), who cheer her up. The night of their school’s football game where she’s the school mascot, her mom gets drunk once again and fails to fetch her. 


The killer then appears and attacks her, using the La Dola dagger, stabbing Millie in the shoulder just when dark clouds cover the moon. 


A wound also unexplainably appears on the killer’s shoulder. But before he can further harm Millie, her cop sister arrives to rescue her. He runs away, dropping the dagger on the grass and the cops retrieve it. 


The next day, Millie and the killer find out that they have swapped bodies. 


This is where the fun begins for the killer in Millie’s body. 


He first gets rid of Ryler, the mean girl who makes fun of Millie, then the abusive school teacher, Mr. Bernardi (Allan Ruck), who is always shaming Millie, cutting him in half with a table saw (one of the most brutally gruesome and disgusting scenes in this movie).


Then the killer meets Nyla and Josh who refuse to believe that he’s actually Millie, until he answers personal questions only the real Millie can supply the answer and they perform together their usual dance routine. 


With their help, Millie learns that she must get the dagger back and stab the killer before midnight, or their body switch will become permanent. Would they succeed to do that when the dagger is now in the possession of the police?


The film succeeds in its intention to be an entertaining combination of horror and comedy. The horror scenes are truly violent and filled with gore, as viewers have come to expect from this genre. 


Both lead stars give engaging performances, but the comedy comes mostly from Vince Vaughn as the merciless serial killer possessed by a teenage girl and he acts like a feminine girly-girl high school student. 


His scenes are a blast and he pulls it all off convincingly with  a go-for-broke portrayal, specially in that scene where he writes a poem that Millie wrote for her crush in school, Booker (Uriah Shelton), to prove that he’s really Millie trapped in the butcher’s body. 


Hilarious support is given by Millie’s best friends, Nyla and Josh, who bring so much energy into their roles. 


Misha Osherovich as the sassy gay friend steals some scenes with his scandalous lines, like when he exclaims to Nyla as the Butcher chases them: “You are black, I’m so gay, we are so dead!” 


Director Landon proves he knows how to blend horror and humor, gags and gore quite seamlessly, with him embracing fully the film’s candy-colored, grimace-inducing mayhem. 

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