Monday, January 5, 2009

Sick Girl

Another installment in the "Masters Of Horror" TV Series...


If you're not familiar with the "Masters of Horror" TV Series then let me give you a brief summary. Basically it's a series of one hour long programs created by directors who typically make horror movies for the big screen, when they create these episodes they typically either:

a) Use it as an excuse to just show a bunch of tits for an hour (It's on HBO)

b) Create some sub-standard story that they obviously wanted to make but knew they didn't want to waste their good time making a full movie out of it

or very rarely...

c) Correctly use the format their given to tell a wonderful short story... this hardly ever happens

Now, as I was perusing through the plot summary's of some of the episodes I hadn't seen yet I saw this one and noted that it was directed by someone I had never heard of (This is supposed to be Masters of horror, let's not forget), involved a "lesbian tryst" and was about some tropical insect getting loose.
This to me meant that it was probably going to be one whole hour of topless lesbians making out while a large unrealistic looking prop spider stalks them slowly while using all sorts of Freudian symbolism and gratuitous lesbian orgy shots. This may not sound at all bad for some of you but when I watch a horror film that's not what I'm looking for so I continuously skipped past Sick Girl and watched some other episodes and a few regrettably shitty movies before finally saying "Well... I guess it's time to endure..." and starting up Sick Girl by Lucky McKee

Thankfully (dum dum dum!) I was entirely wrong about this episode and while there are moments of lesbian boobage and there is a particularly odd looking bug the piece overall was a well-acted, well-written and superbly directed hour. It isn't often we see lesbians in horror films (or possibly most any films) be anything but sassy boring sluts but in Sick Girl the pair are as awkward and fumbling as any straight couple you might expect to see in any Wes Anderson film (I dunno whether comparisons to Wes Anderson films are good to you but they are to me, so that was a compliment) and it seems to me from watching this that Lucky McKee, on writing this, seemed to do what I think is wise in making a horror film that actually stands out, by thinking about the horror plot second and concentrating for the most part on the characters who were all well written and likable. To me that just makes for a story that you actually want to follow rather than just some movie where a bunch of teenagers endlessly run at a guy with a chainsaw to see who can die in the most ridiculous way... fun though that is, it definitely makes for a more lasting greatness if the film is well written.

Which Sick Girl was!

I'm going to give this 4/5 but it might just be because I was expecting a pile of trash when I started watching it. Maybe if I watched it expecting it to be great, as you might now if you haven't already seen it, it would get a more average score but rest assured it's worth checking out!

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