Trolls World Tour (2020)

Please...help me!

Never has a movie been so painful to watch for me. The Amityville Haunting was dull, ignorant and had a strangely incestuous vibe; Disney's remake of The Lion King was a 260-million-dollar autopsy; Up (much to the disbelief of everyone around me) struck me as unbearably saccharine. Of course, the last few years have churned out an obscene number of merchandisable family movies: some were surprisingly enjoyable (The Lego Movie), others were the cinematic equivalent of a puppy massacre (The Emoji Movie). But never have I sat through a movie more vapid, vacant or insulting than Trolls World Tour. I managed to miss the first movie, but got roped into watching this one, and within minutes, my face was contorted into a shape reminiscent of Gordon Ramsay dredging his bare hand through a bucket of rancid shrimp chowder. It remained that way until long after the credits mercifully rolled.

What this film thinks I look like while watching

Trolls World Tour is worse than a Lifetime movie. It is worse than an after-school special. It is worse than any educational film ever played on a janky old VHS machine in a classroom. You see, Trolls has a very particular AND SCREAMINGLY OBVIOUS moral to it. It offers the absolute laziest allegory for racism and the pursuit of a multicultural environment I have ever witnessed. Basically, it turns out that the Trolls from the first movie are Pop Trolls, and that there are many other races of Troll in the world, all defined by their musical genre preference. Other tribes include Rock, Funk, Techno, Classical and Country, each of which has inherited a magical guitar string that represents their culture. Well, some of them did. We meet a number of other genre trolls, such as Reggae and K-Pop, who were apparently not important enough to get their own magic string.

Queen Barb is the head of the Rock Trolls very obviously modelled on Joan Jett, and for whatever reason, she has decided to indoctrinate all the other races with high-voltage rock, with the ultimate goal of a world of Rock Trolls. She rampages round Troll World, assaulting the residents with neon sound waves in order to snatch their strings away. Poppy (voiced irritatingly by Anna Kendrick) is now queen of the Pop Trolls, and sets out on a quest to be the most brightly-coloured SJW in history.

What I actually look like while watching

Now don't get me wrong - these are the sorts of setups that can engage young audiences with more adult topics like discrimination and acceptance, if handled appropriately. But too many family movies these days assume that kids are stupid, and insist on providing their audience with the moral in large print, audio and braille forms, and this is one of the worst offenders. It's apparently not enough for the plot to involve different races trying to remain separate while one character sees them all as one and the same; this movie is determined to be a 90-minute Michael Jackson Black or White music video. Poppy keeps spouting such obvious lines as "There's no difference between us, we're all Trolls!" and basically doing whatever she can to telegraph the point... well, at least when she's not being an empty-headed bitch. The idea that the five writers were sat on their solid-gold sofas somewhere, having been paid to write this trash, made me want to commit harakiri.

Not only is this the worst movie I have ever seen, Poppy is perhaps the worst character I have ever seen. She follows the modern cartoon trope of being loud, 'quirky' and hyperactive, but is emotionally empty. She is an absolute non-character, and when the movie gets to the essential "friends have a fight and go their separate ways" part, she furrows her brow as if we are supposed to believe she feels any emotions beyond self-fellatio. She treats everyone around her horribly, ignoring everything they say while purporting to be an amazing queen who is trying to save her people and unite the nations. Some cuck of a fellow troll called Branch (Justin Timberlake) nips at her heels the entire movie, and eventually professes his love for her, despite her being a cunt.

Ah's ain't no racial stereotype,
noooo Suh!

A llama-type creature that grew up among the Pop Trolls sets out too - again, for some reason - and finds out that he was born to the Funk Trolls but his egg was stolen before he hatched. Given how racially sensitive this shit movie is trying to be, I find it amusing that the character with Funk genetics is voiced by a black guy, has dreads and is a quadruped while all the other trolls are mostly human-like. This character stands out almost like Steve Martin in The Jerk, but supposedly in the name of acceptance. When he meets his birth parents, he is suddenly turned on the race he grew up with, because it turns out that the Pop Trolls stole the Funk Trolls' string years ago. You heard them -- THE WHITE MAN STOLE THE BLACK MAN'S STRING! Unbelievable.

If this wasn't sounding sickening enough to you yet, the human form of Ipicac syrup shows up, because apparently no American family movie can get by without some foreigner shaking things up with a Kent accent. Fucking James Corden voices some stupid fat character that carries around a gimp maggot, who will ultimately give us the first of two "friends have a fight and go their separate ways" skits.

The characters, plot and moral may remind me of Jeff Goldblum saying "that is one big pile of shit", but I'm not even close to done complaining about this celluloid abortion. What Trolls even more obviously than its racially inclusive message, is rip every ounce of nostalgia from our souls, sticks it in a blender and hits frappe. If The Lego Movie has taught other filmmakers anything, it's that pop culture references make a movie. It acts as a Jukebox Musical of the worst kind, filling itself out with heavily-autotuned covers of everyone's favourite songs. "Hey, you like Cyndi Lauper? Well here's her best song if it got sent through Brundle Fly's teleportation pod!" The whole thing goes exactly like that. The majority shareholder of this movie is Mr Horrendous Song-Covers, and every ounce of his input is obnoxiously bright and flashy like an arcade game, seemingly to distract the audience from the lack of substance with shiny things. What isn't horribly boring and vapid dialogue is uber-colourful and robotic music video. The fucking thing even resorts to a 30-second Hammer Time reference to endear us to it, but it made me feel like I would punch this movie if it were a person.

Why do I like you again?

I have never had cancer, but I'm certain that this movie caused some insidious DNA mutation in me. This movie actually made me feel like crying because of how bad it was. When Rolling Stone magazine finally recognises my brilliance and asks me in an interview what the two most painful experiences of my life were, I will reply, "Childbirth and Trolls World Tour". My eyes, ears and soul were violated by this movie, my intelligence had seven shades of shit beaten out of it by this movie, and the only thing this fucking movie taught me is that black people are actually troll llamas named Quincy.

Slender Man (2018)

Who is the real savage?

How in the hell can you make a horror movie so boring and ugly to look at? How do you make a 90 minute movie feel so goddamn long? How do you make a movie without any sense of framing, momentum or feeling of any kind? Well I don't know, but I have a feeling director Sylvain White does. For some reason, makers decided that 2018 was not in the least bit five years too late to milk a buck out of the old creepy pasta Slender Man, and for reasons unclear, a fictional character that thousands around the world have crafted intriguing stories or ideas around wasn't able to become a good movie. It's irritating, seeing as the character has all the pieces to be something really scary, but what was turned out by (who else?) Sony in 2018 was not scary, not entertaining and not even watchable.

Forget everything you know about even the most basic storytelling techniques, because they have no place in this goddamn neighbourhood! Almost every good (or even mediocre) horror knows to open with an attention-grabbing scene to establish thrills and some idea of antagonist--hell, even the really crap movies know to do this. Know how Slender Man opens? With the most bland shots of a high school you can imagine, and then two girls sitting on the bleachers taking selfies. Cor damn! Unencumbered thrills are certain to follow. I don't know how they will possibly top this informative and exhilarating introduction.

Their exact reactions to receiving parts in this film

The first dialogue we get is from the four main girls talking about what age they would be if they could stay that way forever, before they cross paths with a group of boys who say they're going to be having a sleepover and doing secret stuff. As sexual as that sounds, one of the girls later tells the others that the boys are in fact summoning Slender Man--which still sounds pretty sexual. This serves as our very unceremonious introduction to what we know will be the antagonist, but only because the title tells us so.

Within five minutes, the girls are also having a sleepover and soon watch a stupid Ring-style 'website video' that supposedly summons the creature. The pacing of the first act (not that traditional acts are even decipherable) is so jarringly abrupt and sets the tone for the rest of this dull, dull movie: two minute scenes of nothing that continuously fail to establish any flow or linearity. Despite denouncing the concept of Slender Man as bullshit just moments before, they are suddenly creeped out by the video and begin to have crazy visions and stuff.

Although a caption helpfully informs the stupid audience that it is now a week later, the kids are suddenly on a class trip to a cemetery (?!?) and one of the girls just vanishes. Suddenly the cops are here to look for her, and she's a missing person. We're no more than fifteen minutes into the film. You thought that one of the four main characters would get any actual screen time or development? You should have known better. Next one of the other girls starts going crazy and stops coming to school. I can't even remember if she dies or what, the movie just forgets about her and I have no idea what we're supposed to make of it all. By this point Joey King's character has covered every inch of her bedroom wall with scribblings and newspaper clippings and is convinced that Slender Man is after them. It feels like perhaps they are positioning her to be the main character, but then she dies in tree-mendous fashion (sorry), and the one remaining girl is suddenly the central figure.

Sony could legit be the next Jason or Michael. True evil.

Everything is just so disjointed and inconsequential. I have never seen a movie so jumbled and pointless. The split-ended thread of a plotline is padded out to bursting point with pointless sequences of nightmares, hallucinations, stupid visual segues and the worst evil of all... Sony product placement. The movie seems certain that if it throws enough CGI mist and trees and dismembered limbs at you that it'll be scary or even somewhat arty. The real events of the movie could just about make a short, but it has nothing to offer a feature length picture. Decent movies use their run time to create tension and build characters that the audience cares about, whereas all the filler in Slender Man is boring and useless and does nothing to move anything along.

Slender Man is also understood to cause a beanie hat epidemic

The performances never once hit the right note, always falling into either underacting or overacting. Joey King is easily the strongest in the movie, but even she is poorly directed and always seems to be playing a part rather than being a person. White's direction is completely misjudged, coming off as either incompetent or lazy. Slender Man doesn't seem to fit very naturally into White's scant filmography, and he seems way in over his head with directing a horror movie that actually engages the audience. I kept wondering how fucking long the thing had left to run, and when it did end, it was in keeping with the rest of the crappy movie. One shot could have made a reasonable cut to black, but it goes on to another pointless scene, but then it still doesn't end. The final note is a voiceover and schoolkids in the hallways, talking about how we let ideas infect us like viruses or some such shit. The ending aims at some weird Lifetime TV movie moral, and doesn't fit at all with what came before it.

There are plenty of bad horror movies that are at least watchable or entertaining, but Slender Man is the dullest and least scary viewing experience I have had in a good long time. It really is as bad as people say, and having watched it twice now, can confirm that you will gain nothing for checking it out.