ALL LIGHT WILL END (2018)

Originally, I planned to open this with some joke about how there's yet to be a fictional horror author with a pleasant, normal childhood. But on second thought, I genuinely can't think of any real horror authors with a nice, normal life. Stephen King? Hell no. Shirley Jackson? Try again. Dean Koontz? I generally try not to think about him as much as possible, but he certainly doesn't qualify either. So I suppose that's one horror trope I can't poke at too much, as I'm not sure it counts as a trope if there's such a solid grounding in reality. This also leads one to wonder how many more horror authors might exist if not for advancements in therapy... but that's another subject.

Basic horror setups don't get much more classic than "troubled author returns home" - in fact I'm pretty sure that plot single-handedly paid for Stephen King's mansion - but there's nothing wrong with a classic, given it's done well. A young horror author spends a weekend at her childhood home with friends, intermixed with flashbacks of a horrible monster she feared as a child in the same home and the complicated relationship with her author mother. There's also some side story about her father, the local sheriff, investigating a series of gruesome murders with the help of the world's worst two deputies that seem to have wandered off the set of SUPER TROOPERS. Inexplicably, these two plotlines don't really ever come together. Much like this film as a whole.

C'mon boys, the plot's got to be around here somewhere.

I'm not even sure where to begin with this thing. The plot is a mess, the writing is a mess, the acting varies from "decent" to "did you find this guy in a Taco Bell parking lot", and the scares are more or less non-existent. The best thing I can say for this is that there's some neat gore, and visually it's shot competently. Not well, mind you. But fine enough. There's an ongoing attempt to build up an atmosphere of dread and sexual tension that's more or less laughable. The pacing is not helped at all by being constantly broken up by the slightly better portions following the sheriff and his deputies, evidently investigating where the movie they were meant to be in has disappeared to.

Like any random shitty piece of horror, this has to try and throw a series of twists in to keep the audience awake, but without remembering to actually get us even slightly invested in these boring and vaguely unpleasant people. We're talking late-career M. Night Shymalalalala level bad twists. The grand finale not only wasn't much of a shock if you'd been paying even a slight amount of attention to the movie, but it also made me want to roll my eyes so hard they burst in their sockets Fulci-style. Repeat after me, kids: twists do not make a movie good. They can be a good part of a film - assuming the rest is also, y'know, good - but single-handedly they don't make a movie better. Post this over the urinals at every film festival.

Speaking of that grand finale, I haven't laughed this hard at a sequence since THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM. There's an attempt at an eerie music montage at the very end, but after the slow-motion train wreck that the rest of the movie is, it comes off more like the YouTube music video for a shitty metal band. But with worse music, somehow. I desperately want to know how this went over with audiences at the film festivals where it inexplicably came home with an award for Best Original Screenplay (???) and Best Feature Film (?!?!).

For all that, it's far from the worst thing out there, and I could see it being fun to sit around and joke about with friends. It's not awful to look at, and the design for the childhood boogeyman character is neat, as are a few of the kills. It's always a nice change of pace to see an interesting dynamic between mothers and daughters, particularly feeling in her shadow - if only it was better acted.
In all honesty, I'd likely have given it a far worse review if THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM wasn't still so fresh in my mind. It's going to be a while before anything fills me with that level of frothing, eye-twitch inducing rage.

This film does pass the Bechdel test, but that's not much of a credit to it.

2 out of 5

This movie is available for streaming on Netflix.