Art imitates life in the utterly wholesome slasher comedy Family Movie. Maxxxine actor Kevin Bacon, along with wife Kyra Sedgwick (The Possession) and kids Sosie Bacon (Smile, Cold Storage) and Travis Bacon, channels an enduring love of horror in a B-movie sendup that celebrates the indie spirit. It’s a charmer, but one that plays more like an inside family joke than a conventional slasher.
Kevin Bacon, directing from a script by Dan Beers, plays Jack Smith, a micro-budget horror movie director undeterred by his films’ poor reception or lack of funding. It’s not just his love of the genre that keeps him going, but that he’s made his productions a family affair. It’s wife and almost-star Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), his aspiring actress daughter Ula (Sosie Bacon), and his erstwhile Muay Thai fighter son Trent (Travis Bacon) that hold his crude productions together, even when Maya (Liza Koshy), the pesky documentarian daughter to the financier behind Jack’s latest, Blood Moon, interferes. Production really begins to derail when an actual body shows up on the set.
Family Movie introduces its central clan in the middle of a busy shoot that sees each member wearing multiple hats, sometimes even costumes, as fake blood spurts and set mishaps send an actor (Jackie Earle Haley) off with half-hearted threats of a lawsuit. Despite its meta-nature, this heartfelt sequence isn’t so much a love letter to indie horror filmmaking as it is setting the stage for a real slasher to unfurl undetected, at least at first.
Instead, Family Movie operates as the perfect excuse for the Bacon clan to play together as extremely heightened, fictionalized versions of each other. Trent struggles to be noticed in a family of performers, with Ula desperate to land her big break while dutifully supporting dad’s long-stalled career. It’s the latter that Jack will have to reckon with most: the realization that his ego and career have taken precedence over his family’s needs and wants when the bodies start piling up.
While the entire family is having an absolute blast playing loose caricatures of themselves, which goes far in fleshing out their paper-thin characters, it’s Sedgwick who winds up stealing the film as the “awe shucks” matriarch with a fierce protective streak.
Sedgwick delights as the wholesome mom with a vicious edge, which goes far in a film that places family dynamics above all else. The production of Blood Moon and the increasing financial pressure it places on Jack falls quickly into the background, not even the steadfast determination to complete filming feels as important as the wacky horror-comedy hijinks of a family working out their issues while a murderer is on the loose. So much so that the film barrels toward an anticlimactic finish once the Smiths have resolved their interpersonal drama, to its rushed detriment. The good news is that the Bacons don’t skimp on the gore, and the deaths that do punctuate their shenanigans are suitably splatterific.
Family Movie never once wavers from its namesake and intent. Beers’ script and Bacon’s direction present just that, a family movie project. Corn syrup and retractable movie knife props run amok alongside rehearsed dance numbers and actual Bacon home video clips in Family Movie. It’s not a love letter to the genre, though the Bacons wear their affinity for it on their sleeves here.
Instead, it’s an infectiously charming excuse to forge new family memories with an earnest reminder to never lose focus on what matters most, especially when life gets bloody.
Family Movie made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.
