Welcome to The Shortening! For February, we adjust the height on our camera to focus on movies featuring vertically challenged villains. If you have your own blog or podcast and plan to do the same, be sure to leave a note in the comment with your links!
WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME?
I see a movie poster with a silly title. I queue it up expecting a campy good time.
What do I get instead?
An actual decent movie.
Did I not leave enough crab cakes out for John Waters on Christmas Eve?
Quick Plot: Polina and Igor are devoted parents to 6-year-old son Vanya, but all it takes is one day playing outside by himself for an accident to leave them shattered. Igor, a doctor, refuses to identify the mangled body as his own, putting his and his wife's lives in limbo as the parents of a missing, not dead child.
Three years pass when Igor convinces the reluctant Polina to visit a countryside orphanage in the hopes of bringing home a child. Instead, they stumble on a grisly crime scene. The manager has been found dead, and the only person that may have seen what happened is a feral child.
Polina quickly bonds with the boy. A fuzzy adoption grants them custody, with a sympathetic police chief keeping watch on the situation.
Back home, the boy adapts rather quickly to his surroundings in Vanya's old bedroom. It's so seamless that Polina begins calling him by her son's name (convenient if anything was monogrammed). Igor isn't thrilled, but with his wife finally happy and a poor child in good hands, how can he complain?
The situation quickly reverses when Polina discovers she's pregnant. Vanya isn't thrilled about big brotherhood, and as anyone who's ever watched an evil child (OR EVIL BOY) movie might guess, Polina's pregnancy just got a whole lot harder.
Directed by Olga Gorodetskaya, Evil Boy (originally titled the classier Stray) doesn't bring much newness to the dangerous child genre, but for most of its running time, it's an engrossing, haunting watch. Leads Elena Lyadova and Vladimir Vdovichenkov create a believably loving but stressed marriage, and young Sevastian Bugaev toes a fine line with his creepy but sweet Vanya. It's hard not to care about this messy family, even when you know nothing good will come from their union.
Unfortunately, Evil Boy stumbles badly with one of the worst CGI visuals I've seen in years.
WORSE.
The movie somewhat recovers from this, but ultimately, the ending doesn't quite satisfy. Still, for a good hundred minutes, this is some good stuff.
High Points
One of the secrets to getting your audience invested in a horror movie is to, you won't believe this, allow your audience to like your characters. From both the perfromances and screenplay, Polina and Igor are incredibly sympathetic, but what really made Evil Boy click for me was how kindly the local police chief was drawn. It's a supporting part that didn't need much backstory, but there's a careful effort to make him a good man. That goes a long way.
Low Points
If you were alive in the '90s, you know all too well the horrors of Ally McBeal's dancing baby nightmare. While that image was indeed terrifying, nobody should ever be reminded of it during the unironic climax of a horror movie
Lessons Learned
Traumatized boys have mental disorders
In any movie with a potentially evil child and a cat, do not, and I repeat, do not ever get attached to the cat
Russians don't know the difference between a pitbull and bull terrier
Rent/Bury/Buy
Save for that tragic final act choice, Evil Boy is quite good. It doesn't offer many surprises, but those looking for a decently made, fairly serious killer kid film shouldn't be too disappointed. Find it on Amazon Prime.
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