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Watched on: SYFY

Ran: 7.15 miles, 9’13”/mile, 01:05:58 (recovery run)

 

For now, at least, I’m blessed with an embarrassment of riches in that I have access to plenty of top streaming services, so between Shudder, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Showtime, and STARZ, I’m not exactly having a tough time finding stuff to watch. (Which is not to say that I don’t regularly feel the pain of missing out on Hulu and Disney+ exclusives, but MAN that’s a first-world problem if ever there was one.) Nonetheless, sometimes it’s nice to remind ourselves that if we only focus on the big guys, we can miss out on some real gems—like tonight’s little surprise, You Might Be the Killer. Right now it’s only available on SYFY, despite the fact that it isn’t about a sharkcentric weather event or any of your variously-enormous crocodilids vs. robo-any-other-vaguely-fierce-creatures.

 

YMBtK is another entry in an ever-lengthening line of meta-slashers that followed Scream, arguably the first horror movie that was set in a universe in which anyone had ever actually, y’know, seen a horror movie. This one is an homage in particular to Friday the 13th and similar camp slashers from the 1980s: we’ve got a masked killer with a big honkin’ blade, a bunch of camp counselors getting offed in inventive ways, and even an onscreen body count in a very ’80s typeface with an aged film effect. And just like in Scream, characters’ knowledge of how scary movies work is key to them navigating and surviving the scary movie they currently inhabit. The key difference in You Might Be the Killer is that the protagonist, uh, might be the killer. Actually, no, he’s TOTALLY the killer, and that’s not really a spoiler; the movie stops being a whodunit pretty much right after the main characters are established and instead becomes a howdoIstopdoingit, which is way more entertaining.

 

Literally the first scene has Our Hero Sam fleeing and panicked, desperately wiping the gore off his face and trying to smile calmly so he can unlock his phone with face recognition, and that is sort of emblematic of the whole movie right there: a smart chuckle in a bloodbath. He’s calling his best friend Chuck, who works at the mother of all comic shops and just happens to be an expert on horror movies. He informs her that there’s a masked maniac slaughtering all the counselors, and together they work out pretty quickly through a series of flashbacks that Sam is committing the murders himself while under the influence of a cursed mask carved from an evil tree. (Yeah, it’s a whole thing.) Chuck tries to talk Sam through finding a way to break the curse while also not killing anyone else and yet still avoiding the time-honored fate of all masked camp maniacs: death at the hands of the chaste and innocent Final Girl.

 

I have to say, I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did. YMBtK’s conceit of “what if the protagonist turns out to be the killer but he doesn’t know it, lol” (reportedly it originated from a Twitter thread) seems pretty thin to carry a feature-length movie, but some smart humor, a couple of likable characters, and a clear love of the source material are the Hamburger Helper that stretches it into a meal. There’s more graphic violence that I expected from a SYFY flick and it’s pretty well done, as befits a love letter to its 1980s forerunners.

 

Given the film’s central conflict of man-vs.-himself-plus-evil-mask, decent acting is crucial to the film’s success, and I’m happy to report that the performances are strong where they need to be. Fran Kranz (Topher from Doll House! And, uh, Stoner Marty from The Cabin in the Woods) is superb as Sam, a nice guy completely out of his element, who is simultaneously disarmingly nerdy, panic-stricken, and genuinely remorseful about splitting people’s heads open while cursed. And even twenty years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if you put Alyson Hannigan in something, I’ll happily watch it, even if all she does is read the phone book out loud… or, more to the point, talk on the phone for an hour and a half while closing up a comic book shop. That said, she doesn’t phone it in (get it?) as Chuck, Sam’s semi-blasé Oracle/Guy in the Chair. Brittany Hall and Jenna Harvey are both solid as potential final girls Imani and Jamie, respectively. And while he’s mostly just a running gag, Bryan Price is surprisingly memorable as Steve the Kayak King.

 

YMBtK is flawed, no question, but more in design than in execution. Sam and Chuck are by far the two most engaging characters with the most important relationship, the best chemistry, and some terrific subtext—but they can never share the screen together because their entire interaction is via phone calls. Meanwhile, almost everyone else is a one-dimensional character at best and a meat prop at worst, but that’s the thing about ’80s slashers: you gotta have machete fodder. The story’s conceit more or less requires that it be pieced together in non-chronological flashbacks, and the mental work required to follow it is a bit at odds with the whole let’s-have-fun vibe—but to be frank, even if you’re not 100% following the plot, you’re still going to enjoy yourself.

 

Bottom line: it’s a joyful romp, especially if you happen to join me in the Venn overlap between a fondness for ’80s slasher flicks and a love of Joss Whedon TV shows. I don’t expect it to become a venerated classic or anything, but I’d certainly see it again sometime. And I’d DEFINITELY see the sequel the ending jokingly teases.