WTF (2017)

Studio:       Midnight Releasing
Director:    Peter Herro
Writer:       Peter Herro, Christopher Centanni, Adam Buchalter
Producer:  Kyle Zingler
Stars:     Callie Ott, Nicholas James Reilly, Andrea Hunt, Benjamin Norris, Sarah Agor, Johnny James Fiore, Adam Foster, Perez Hilton

Review Score:

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Summary:

A teenager with a tortured past relives her trauma when her friends are targeted for murder during a Spring Break getaway.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

During a pool party, high school friends Rachel Hansen, Bonnie, Lisa, Jacob, Bevan, and Rachel’s disrespectful boyfriend Sam discuss what to do for Spring Break. Jacob suggests that they party at his late uncle’s remote cabin in the woods.

Rachel gets weirded out and exits the conversation. Bonnie mentions to the others that Rachel was the sole survivor of a brutal massacre three years earlier and is still traumatized.

Rachel’s brother Toby comforts Rachel when she suddenly has a nervous breakdown during class. Toby invites himself on the upcoming trip to the woods to keep an eye on Rachel’s wellbeing.

Rachel, Bonnie, Lisa, Jacob, Bevan, Sam, and Toby stop at a motel on their way to the woods. Sam texts another girl behind Rachel’s back while Bevan and Jacob have sex with two hookers.

After a brief stop at a convenience store, the teens arrive at the cabin. The friends drink, smoke pot, and play games. The boys routinely make lewd comments toward the girls. Rachel struggles with flashbacks to her previous trauma. Sam grows frustrated with Rachel repeatedly resisting his sexual advances.

While sunbathing by the pool, everyone except for Rachel and Toby goes skinny-dipping. Bonnie gets out of the pool and gruesomely injures her bare foot when she steps on a long nail.

That evening, Sam and Lisa sneak away to have sex. After spying on Bonnie in the shower, Bevan returns to the couch to play a video game alone. A hooded killer slits Bevan’s throat.

The surviving six friends panic when Bevan’s body is discovered. Sam is forced to admit he was having sex with Lisa as his alibi, which greatly upsets Rachel.

Everyone decides to leave only to discover that neither car will start. Claiming he heard the commotion, the convenience store clerk comes to the cabin. Sam hastily kills the clerk. The dying clerk shows that he was trying to return Bonnie’s credit card, which she left at his store.

Sam goes back inside. The killer castrates Sam. Sam dies.

Lisa is attacked from behind but recovers when she goes to look for Sam. Rachel, Toby, Jacob, and Bonnie regroup with Lisa inside the cabin. After fighting with Rachel about Sam, Lisa leaves to walk to the store to find a working landline.

Rachel and Toby go their own way. Jacob leaves Bonnie alone in the cabin while he goes to find Lisa. The killer beats Bonnie before burning her to death with a lighter and hairspray.

Rachel and Toby regroup with Jacob. Toby knocks Jacob and then Rachel unconscious.

Toby fatally wounds Lisa by putting an ax into her back outside. Jacob recovers. Jacob tries calling 911 from a cellphone and then finds Lisa dying outside.

Rachel recovers and regroups with Jacob. Rachel tells Jacob that her brother Toby is responsible for the murders. Jacob tells Rachel that he has no idea who Toby is, revealing that Toby was a figment of Rachel’s imagination and Rachel was the killer all along.

In her Toby persona, Rachel disembowels Jacob. Flashbacks shows Rachel mourning her brother’s death as well as whispering the idea to spend Spring Break at the cabin in Jacob’s ear.

Rachel is arrested. Interrogating detectives realize Rachel thinks her dead brother committed the murders, yet they have no concrete evidence connecting her directly to the crimes. Rachel’s real name is revealed to be Whitney Teresa Fitzgerald.

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Review:

Rachel Hansen is in some elite company alongside Laurie Strode as one of the few filmic Final Girls to survive more than one movie massacre.  The first came three years ago under hush-hush circumstances she doesn’t talk about much today.  The second comes just two months before high school graduation, when a woodland getaway turns deadly for her and six friends.

It’s pool party time for a bunch of twentysomething teens and pseudo-celebrity Perez Hilton.  Already overage when previously seen playing a former student attending his ten-year reunion in “Most Likely to Die,” Hilton cameos in “WTF” as a classmate whose thinning hair should out him immediately as a probable narc.  Instead, his cry of, “Spring f*cking Break, p*ssies!” rallies Rachel’s friend circle of stoners, socialites, and sexualized stereotypes to come up with a way to celebrate.

Even though it has no Wi-Fi or cellphone service, because of course, Jacob’s uncle’s remote cabin is the perfect place for seven millennials to chug beers, pass a bong, tease each other about f*cking their mothers, and sexually harass their female friends under the pretense of being funny.  But first comes a quick stop at a country convenience store, where a grizzled local manning the register offers an ominous warning that the septet may wish to reconsider their choice of vacation spots.

“F*ck you old-timer!” thinks everyone without saying the words.  Kate Mara lookalike Rachel, her cad boyfriend Sam, rich bitch Bonnie, tomboyish hussy Lisa, the professor, Mary Ann, and a partridge in a pear tree have a full weekend ahead of them that involves catting around on their girlfriends, picking up hookers at a roadside motel, putting a hand down the pants while watching another friend shower, and other immature events that sensible advice dare not get in the way of.

Unfortunately for these frolicking friends, an unknown killer has a different agenda.  Best-laid plans begin changing quickly as soon as bodies start dropping one at a time.  New action items include splitting up for no reason, swearing out loud when escape cars won’t start, and screaming at each sign of slaughter when not screaming at each other.

We already know from the Keyser Soze framing device that Rachel lasts at least long enough to be interrogated by authorities.  Who/what else might make it through to the end intact?  Certainly not your interest in this movie, that’s for sure.

Maybe you’re reading through the preceding synopsis and wondering, “yeah, yeah, I get the formula and all that.  But what’s the hook?  Surely ‘WTF!’ has some sort of sly slant on the slasher subgenre or tongue-in-cheek take on its tropes?”

Nope.  Not really.  “WTF” is as straightforward as all of the above indicates, complete with every annoying cardboard character and cliché you outgrew in your adolescence, or stopped finding entertainment in when your age reached double digits.

“WTF” doesn’t pick a side in determining what kind of horror film it wants to be, e.g. serious, satirical, or straight up scary.  Viewers make it well past the midsection entirely unsure if the movie is even in on the joke that it is completely tone deaf, because nothing about its outward attitude invites laughing with it, only at it.  The film’s simple story and simpler style merely make it to a point of such obnoxious absurdity that one is forced to believe the filmmakers must have known better, yet couldn’t clue in their audience to that fact.

Incessant insults and nonstop acts of sexual aggression eventually become so excessive that you finally think it was “WTF’s” point all along.  Except without any charm to its “maybe/maybe not” comedy, or arty edge to its exploitation of horror movie expectations, “WTF” only ends up as unwoke as any 21st-century teen slasher can possibly be.

What the cast is doing can’t even be considered acting.  It’s seven people behaving like typical movie teens, taking their tops off, repeatedly telling each other to “f*ck off,” and possibly improvising the entire affair without any outsider being able to tell the difference.  The movie then marches ahead to a “twist” ending less likely to elicit an “ooh!” and more likely to make you mutter the movie’s title aloud.

Speaking of which, as much as I might want to, there is virtually no way to use the movie’s title against it in some sort of clever criticism wordplay that isn’t totally hackneyed.  I’ll just leave it at, “WTF?”  WTF, indeed.

Review Score:  30

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