I Just Saw

Well, I just saw Imaginary, the latest Blumhouse excretion, and it’s an Oscar contender for most boring film of the year. This was actually a major disappointment since the trailers made it seem as though it’d be visually and conceptually interesting. Filmed through what seemed to be eyeholes in a mask and evoking a topsy-turvy reality, it gave me hope that it would at least be intriguing in its idea. What it was, however, was a painfully boring series of bloodless (in both senses of the term) “suspense” scenes where people wander around a house waiting for the inevitable musical chord to strike. It’s a garbage movie for teenagers, basically, of a type that’s kept the genre going at the box office for generations.

In the olden days, if your horror film didn’t have much of a cogent plot or interesting characters, it would at least have ridiculous gore, campy humour, or even just some softcore erotica. (A few of the slasher directors behind Elm Street, Friday, et al came from porn.) I’m thinking of The Mangler (1995), Dr Giggles (1992), The Prowler (1981). These aren’t good or even passable films by any stretch, but The Mangler gives you a haunted laundry press that forces workers through a quarter-inch opening and separates them from their limbs, cops fighting with an animate refrigerator on a front lawn, and a panto performance from Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as well as a far too committed one from Ted “Buffalo Bill” Devine.

What does Imaginary give? At one point the teenage character’s no-good beau comes over and is given a good scare by a shapeshifting teddy bear. That’s it. No blood, he’s not even really hurt, and is promptly sent home by his mother. Yeesh. His head should have been floating in the toilet, discovered by the girl when she goes to throw up on seeing his decapitated body propped up in a chair, the teddy on his lap.

That’s Blumhouse for you, though. Director/co-writer Jeff Wadlow has a brief from CEO Jason Blum, and it’s to bring the stinker in at PG-13 (15 over here) so all the teenyboppers can feel as though they’ve seen a grown-up film. The classification card promised “strong threat” and literally nothing else. No language, no violence… Just “strong threat”. Oooo, there’s a threat that something MIGHT happen. Well slap my crotch and book a deep clean for these knickers.

I miss the days when there were compensations for finding yourself in a trashy movie, but again, it’s Blumhouse. They’re the carnival barker who promises you intoxicating sights and, once you’ve paid, shows you a bored “entertainer” in a bikini. And not even a skimpy one.

The plot is that DeWanda Wise plays a woman who moves back into her childhood home with her husband and stepdaughters, only for the younger stepdaughter to befriend a teddy bear she calls Chauncey – because despite the presence of iPhones this is apparently the 1920s – and develop an increasingly weird relationship with it.

The threat here is so nebulous and vague that it’s hard to describe. There’s something about an entity that lives on children’s imaginations and wants to draw them to its realm, in one scene as the second act becomes the third there’s a bit of exposition about fairy tales from different cultures describing real phenomena… It’s tough to care. The bulk of the film is just walking around, boo!; walking around, boo! The sort of thing that’s supposed to be suspenseful but is just vacant and formulated.

A kernel of an idea exists somewhere inside this. It was done a thousand times better in 7 to 14 or so pages by Thomas Ligotti, in “The Frolic”, a short story about a psychologist called in to assess a suspected child-killer whose identity and background are a total mystery. A child is kidnapped, their bedroom ringing with alien laughter, and left behind is a note that says that in the gutters of the universe, “my awestruck little deer and I have gone frolicking.” I was reminded of that in a scene from Imaginary where a kid is interviewed about their invisible friend. Wallow and Blum, though, are unable with their brief to be anywhere near cruel enough to make it scary. Save yourself 104 minutes, rent Songs of a Dead Dreamer from your local library or Internet Archive, and read “The Frolic” instead.

Rating: 1/4