Tonight She Comes - C

Quick Hit: Yikes.

There’re not too many things in a horror movie I haven’t seen before. From the so called Worst Movies Ever (like Troll 2 and Manos: The Hands of Fate), to movies proclaiming they have the most gore ever (Dead Alive), to movies that just make you squirm (Audition, Salo, etc.), I’ve pretty much covered the gambit in my time as an ambitious movie lover. So whenever I hear reviews of a movie saying that you haven’t seen something like this on screen before, I feel my inner horror sense tingling and I start to get really excited. I heard those things about Tonight She Comes, which screens tonight at 9:30 at the Tivoli Theater for SLIFF 2017. Here’s the movie page for SLIFF.

I’ll fully admit this – there were some scenes that I cringed in this movie, but not all of them were the gore.  Some was the excrutiatingly (possibly intentional) poor dialogue. At times, it’s clear the movie is meant to be a spoof, but it’s not as polished as something like The Evil Dead or The Cabin In The Woods, which I consider to be some of the best homage horror out there. The movie has a very familiar set-up – horny, drinking teenagers at a lake house, and I liked the fact that it immediately had a story to tell. This was going to be about gore and about sex, and the entire story would pivot around those things. And it does, so in that sense, the film is an immense success. When your main villain/slasher is essentially just a naked woman covered in blood, you kind of check off the sex and gore boxes.

The characters range from your stereotypes of horny teens to your stereotypes of rednecks. The one character that I will say rises above her writing is Jenna McDonald’s character Felicity. Originally painted as “conflicted redneck”, she somehow manages to make her character “arc” seem compelling and fun. Throw in the fact that she’s one of the few characters that is convincing, and you can see why she was cast as arguably the main character (again, if you don’t talk to mute, blood-covered murder machine).

So, the main selling point is the gore. There’s a lot of it. A LOT OF IT. There’s some scenes here that really will make you wince, particularly one of the final scenes, which… wow. Just watch it and find out for yourself. For the most part, I think a lot of these effects were done pretty well for a limited budget. Sure, sometimes it seems like there is a bit too much syrup to the blood, and there’s times where the prostetics look like prosthetics. But overall, it’s impressive enough to make you go EWWWWWWWWWWW.

Overall, I think if you go into this movie looking to be scared, you’re going into it with the wrong mindset. Have a few drinks beforehand and be a person that enjoys horror that is off the beaten path, and you might find a few things to enjoy about this movie. I’m going to give the film a “C”.

For more on this film, check out IMDB.