Movies
[Tribeca Review] ‘Fear, Inc.’ Forgets to Scare
I think we’ve hit peak twist when it comes to entertainment. “The Twilight Zone” set the bar, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense took it to a completely new level. Now, after nearly two decades of red herring cinema, it has worn out its welcome. While Vincent Masciale’s Fear, Inc., which just had its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, offers nothing new in this regard, it’s at least entertaining.
Fear, Inc. is carried on the back of Lucas Neff, who plays Joe, a boisterous horror junkie who is desperately wanting to be scared, no, terrified. When a man (played by The Sandlot’s Patrick Renna) overhears his complaints, he offers the aid of a company called Fear, Inc. Joe, who can’t stand monotony anymore, calls the number of the business card, setting off a chain of events that echo classic horror cinema (from Friday the 13th to SAW).
Penned by Luke Barnett, the film is heavy inside baseball, but is glued together by fun characters and a series of horror-related gags. Neff is hysterical, and almost single-handedly makes the film watchable, while the rest of the cast elevate themselves to his energy.
The problem, however, is that Fear, Inc. is trying way too hard to outsmart the viewer, and ultimately ends up muddying up the impact with no actual tonal shift. The film could be likened to Behind the Mask in that, when it’s time to get serious, it never elevates itself. It’s focusing so hard on tricking the viewer that it forgets that its sole job is to be a horror film.
And as twisty as the plot may be, the pic is about as generic as it gets. Still, you could do much worse than Fear, Inc., which at least carries a fun spirit and heart of gold.
Ultimately, the irony here is that Fear, Inc. is about a horror fan wanting to feel something, anything, yet doesn’t offer this courtesy to its viewers.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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