What Are the Creepy Kids Up To?

            Three years ago, Zach Cregger popped onto the horror scene with Barbarian, which quickly became a beloved movie amongst horror fans. The opening act of Barbarian is top tier suspenseful film making, like sitting on the edge of your seat grabbing the arm rest level of fear, but then the second and third act hit, and it is like a completely different movie tonally. It turned more into a horror comedy than straight up scary. For the most part I really enjoyed it, so I was excited when I saw the trailer for Weapons, and it looked terrifying, because I knew that Cregger was capable of creating the right atmosphere to make this successful, but I was also worried that it would fall into the same trap as Barbarian and lose the tone.

            The whole premise of the movie is that a whole class of second graders disappear, except for one kid and the teacher. Obviously, this becomes a massive deal for the whole town, as they all scramble to find an answer or even a clue as to where these kids ran off to. There were ring camera videos of the children running out of some of the houses, but once they were out of sight of the camera, there was no trace of them. The teacher, Justine, was devasted by their disappearance, and she took it upon herself to search for an answer, and there was one parent, Archer, who also was conducting his own investigation, but he was convinced that it was Justine that was responsible for their disappearance.

            The person that was interviewed the most in the investigation was Alex, the one student from the class that did not disappear, but he had no answers as to what happened, but Justine kept trying to talk to him, and then she followed him to his house one day, and all the windows were covered with newspaper, and when she found a hole and peered in, his parents were just sitting on the couch unmoving in the dark. When she told the principal, and he called for the parents to come in, Alex’s aunt came in instead of his parents, because they were “sick.”

            This story is told in chapters, and the stories slowly converge at the end, each chapter is focused on a different character, and then the last chapter brings everyone together. Normally in horror movies, most of the characters suck and have a lack of development, but in this structure, there was enough background on all the characters to build a connection with them, and it actually left me wanting more time with each of the characters. Some of the chapters had cliff hanger endings, so that added to the wanting for more time with the characters too.

            So my biggest problem with Barbarian was the tonal shift it had from being scary to being absurd and closer to a comedy. Weapons does not necessarily have this problem in as strong of a manner, because there is not a big tonal shift, but it does have the comedy aspect interspersed throughout it. So it does have moments where it wavers in tone, but it is not like a switch flips, and it becomes a totally different movie. It did not scare me as much as I was hoping, there were a few jump scares, but I feel like the trailer had it set out to be terrifying throughout, but I ended up laughing more than being scared.

            The theme of the movie did seem a little up in the air. Ultimately, I think it was about grief or dealing with a family member being deathly ill. Alex’s aunt was really sick, and she moved in to Alex’s house, and it was a ton for them to deal with, and spoiler, she ended up being a witch, and the only way for her to get better was to feast on people she took control of, so initially it was just Alex’s parents, but she needed more, so she feasted on the 17 children from Alex’s class. Taking care of someone as a full-time task can be hard and suck the life out of you, especially if it is an around the clock task.

            It also had to do with dealing with grief. When 17 children disappear, there is going to be a huge amount of grief, and they showed people handling it in different ways. Even Archer went through different forms of grief during the movie. He initially was paralyzed by the grief. He slept in his son’s bed, and struggled to do anything at work, but then he was incredibly active in the search of his son, and from one scene, it was apparent that he was dealing with it in a very different way from his wife.

            The one other read I had on the movie was that it was trying to analogize a school shooting. There was one kid who survived, and in the initial flash back scenes, they were making it look like Alex was constantly getting picked on so they were making it seem like he was going to snap, and he made all the kids disappear. Although he did play a role in making them disappear, he was doing it more for the love of his parents than it was for getting revenge on the kids being mean to him. He was not snapping from the bullying, he just wanted his family back, so that is what makes me think that the movie was not an analogy for school shootings, but I could see how it would be taken that way.

            Like many memorable scary movies, there were some hyper violent moments that will stick in my head. The one that will haunt me the most is when Alex’s aunt showed Alex the power she had over her parents, and she made them start stabbing their faces with forks, and there were holes in their face, and it was just nasty and made me flinch in my seat. The other big one involved a peeler. The aunt sicked another person onto the teacher when she was trying to save Alex and the children, and she was being choked on a counter in the kitchen. She grabbed a peeler and used it on the guy’s face for like three strips, and it was gnarly. Then the movie concluded with then children chasing down the aunt and literally ripping her apart in a gory mess.

            It was a funny scene to watch all the kids chase down the aunt and the visuals of her being ripped apart were a little excessive. I cannot say I loved the ending, because it felt silly, the chase was very comedic, which again messes with the tone, and there was some epilogue voiceover at the end that basically said that Alex’s parents ended up in a mental institute, but then it did not explain what happened to the 17 kids, which is what the whole movie was about. Maybe that would have been too sad of an ending to say that all 17 kids also ended up in an institute, but to leave that as a cliff hanger seemed odd.

            Overall, it was a really good movie. I had a fun time at the theater. It was not as scary as I wanted it to be, but it gave me big enough laughs that I was not too mad at the comedic elements. The story structure bothered me at first because of the cliff hangers to the chapters, but when it all came together in the end, I ended up appreciating how it was done, and it is the rare horror movie where I wanted more time with everyone. I give it 3.5 stars and would recommend going and seeing it in the theaters.