Zachary FenellSaturday Boners: Boy Eats Girl
February 21st 2009 18:01
Boy Eats Girl, 2005
There was such potential and I had such high hopes. I thought to myself, "Hey, with a title like Boy Eats Girl, they're going out on a limb and there's no possible way they can let this turn into something it shouldn't be. It may be low-budget or indie, but it's gotta be good, right?"
Boy howdy, I was wrong.
I almost want to say "anything that could go wrong, did", but that's not entirely accurate. In fact, if there had been a plethora of technical issues, I might've been a little more forgiving. No, Boy Eats Girl commits almost every single sin a horror movie could. It starts out trying to be clever by title alone, and then it develops a vague case of multiple personality disorder.
(Let me make this clear: a vague case of MPD is far more disturbing than a serious case of MPD. The latter lends a layer of interesting, the former snaps to focus that the writer is just not very good.)
What makes a good horror movie? You have protagonists ("victims") that you connect with or relate to on some level. They are threatened by either an individual of intense power or a group of collective power. The threat must be sufficient to produce a fear response and to provoke a shift of will in the primary protagonist from being a "victim" to being "empowered". Why run from the monster when you can turn and kick it in the goonies? And throughout all of this, it needs to have dialogue that was not lifted from every other screamer movie. A sense of humor is great - and sometimes necessary - but it should never get in the way of the action.
And, again, with a name like Boy Eats Girl, you're thinking, "Hey, this should be very tongue-in-cheek!" No... no... I don't think so. Not even a little bit. It could have been, but what it turned into was a really ham-handedly bad "comedy of errors" (I hate those) about a stupid kid being a judgmental twerp about his friend-who-is-a-girl. His reactions to the circumstances are almost as ridiculous as the fact that... oh, yeah, there are zombies, too. (Never mind the plot holes you can drive a dump truck through. Those are almost secondary sins.)
Alas, the biggest sin of all was that it was boring. I didn't care about any of the characters, although I was morbidly fascinated by the female lead's eyebrows and why the make-up crew decided to make her look like she was already a vampire or lycanthrope or something. I was also kind of curious about the Richard Metzger look-alike. (Don't worry if you don't get this reference, but check out DisInfo anyway.) In the end, there was very little that was salvageable, in my opinion, and that made me a little sad.
1.5 Stars
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