Grave Encounters (2011)

In every found-footage movie I’ve ever seen, there comes a point when the scriptwriters, “cleverly” anticipating audience objections, have one of the characters demand something to the effect of “Why are you still filming, you freak?”  There has not been a single instance in found-footage-movie history where someone has produced a satisfactory answer to that question.  I would like to suggest that maybe in future films we should just skip that exchange and stipulate that someone will always be That Freak Who Keeps Filming.

I actually wasn’t going to watch Grave Encounters, mostly because of the whole found-footage thing.  I am so done with found footage, Hollywood.  Unless your name is actually Jaume Balagueró, please stop using it.  The odds that you will actually do anything original or clever with it are vanishingly small.

However, both Unkle Lancifer from Kindertrauma and Andre from The Horror Digest reported that Grave Encounters was great fun, and I have a huge weakness for abandoned mental hospitals, so I queued it up on Netflix.

Right out of the starting gate, Grave charmed me with a hilariously spot-on parody of risible network reality-show intros.  The basic plot of the film is that a team of “ghost hunters” – who don’t seem to actually believe in ghosts, but do any of them? – are filming a ghost-hunting reality show in the abandoned Collingwood (ha) mental hospital, the history of which seems to borrow pretty liberally from the “Asylum” episode of Supernatural.  There’s some truly amusing setup in which they interview various people about ghostly goings-on (the gardener steadfastly denies having seen anything weird until he gets a cash payment, and then there are ghosts all over the place).  Then they’re locked into the hospital for the night, which turns out to be a bad move.

The first hints of weird happenings are both relatively subtle and great fun – things move when people’s backs are turned, doors slam unexpectedly, and so forth.  Then the haunting stuff started in earnest, and I was reminded of the second reason I don’t like found-footage movies: they mostly involve running and screaming (the characters) and motion sickness (me).

What I saw of it after that was pretty good.  There were places where the special effects fell down a bit – the ghost photos had more of gravy than of grave about them, and one guy apparently dies when he’s thrown down a hallway at a speed and distance that wouldn’t have seriously injured me, let alone a man half again my size.   But the actual ghosts are fun and creepy, the group’s descent into the freakout zone is well paced, and the show’s host (Sean Rogerson) shows a reserve of spine and determination entirely unexpected from someone who does reality shows for a living.  I think I would really have enjoyed it if the camera work hadn’t made me as sick as a dog.

So what’s the verdict?  Honestly?  It depends on how prone you are to motion sickness.  There were some good scares, some clever shots, a funny send-up of the reality-show industry, and fewer unlikeable characters than one might expect.  On the other hand, it almost made me lose my lunch.  If you get motion sick, I can’t entirely recommend it; at the least, you’ll need to start pacing yourself with the amount of time you actually spend looking at the movie fairly early on.  I’m giving the movie three stars on its own merits, because if you can overlook the nausea it induces it’s a pretty fun movie.  If you’re easily nauseated, though, knock off a star and weigh costs versus benefits carefully.  Or at least take Dramamine first.

The Baby’s Room (2006)

“The Baby’s Room,” one of six films on Spain’s Films to Keep You Awake compilation, is an entertaining and worthwhile (if not entirely satisfying) film from director Álex de la Iglesia.  I mention the director off the bat because the only other movie of his I’ve seen is the incoherent and tedious The Oxford Murders, so now I consider myself compensated for having sat through the latter movie.

In all honesty, the storyline in “The Baby’s Room” is not a model of coherence either.  I’m still not quite sure how exactly everything happened that happened.  (Ghosts?  Demonic possession?  Quantum physics? What?)  Fortunately, though, it’s an entertaining enough journey that I didn’t feel like I enjoyed the movie less for not having had a cast-iron grip on every single plot detail.

Sports writer Juan, his wife Sonia, and their new baby – walking away with a hands-down victory in the Most Adorable Family in the Horror Canon competition – move into a very large, very old house that should be expensive but wasn’t because (a) it needs renovating, and (b) no one lives there for very long.  I keep trying to find a house like this myself but have thus far been unsuccessful, so I guess people in horror movies are better at house-hunting on Craigslist than I am.

Soon, though, things start falling apart.  Juan and Sonia hear voices from the baby’s room over the monitor, but there’s no one there.  Juan buys a video baby monitor, sees a man actually sitting by the crib, and justly freaks out.  He becomes more and more obsessed with burglars, then with the idea that the house might be haunted, until Sonia gives up and packs the baby off to her mother’s.  This leaves Juan at the house with a wall full of baby video monitors – through which, in a wonderfully creepy set piece, he watches a man murder his wife and baby, in real time, while in the world outside the video camera Juan is alone in the house.

(While all this is going on, by the way, Juan is also having to cope with the demands of his day job.  This is a rather wondrous departure from American horror movies, where hauntings seem to be largely a problem afflicting the independently wealthy.)

Half the fun of The Baby’s Room is trying to figure out exactly what’s going on.  Is Juan seeing an old murder enacted by ghosts?  Is it a recording of the murder stored somehow in the house’s very walls?  Is it a portal to a parallel universe where Juan is actually seeing some sort of mirror-Juan with more than a few screws loose?  Is Juan just cracking up and having hallucinations?  You only actually find out the answer to one of those questions, in a Twilight Zone-ish ending that feels more satisfying than it objectively should; but if you resign yourself to going “Enh, sometimes things are ineffable,” it’s a fun ride anyway.

So what’s the verdict?  Three stars.  I think half the reason I enjoyed this as much as I did is that Juan and Sonia are so engaging.  I’d probably have been a lot less forgiving of the film’s few weaknesses if it was framed around the typical, vaguely off-putting WASP couple beloved of most horror-movie directors, living a life of suspect affluence rudely interrupted by ghosts.  (Disclosure: I watched part of 1999′s In Dreams yesterday before Annette Bening and Aidan Quinn so got on my last nerve that I had to turn it off.)  I can deal with the occasional movie where even the people we’re supposed to sympathize with are pretty unpleasant, but not a steady diet of them; so the charming and unpretentious family in “The Baby’s Room” were a welcome breath of fresh air as well as just being enjoyable to watch.

Anyway, rants about unsympathetic main characters aside, “The Baby’s Room” is definitely worth the watch.  I may have to check out the other five movies in the release.

Wake Wood (2011)

So you’re watching a movie and it basically goes like this:

1.  Don’t bring your kid back from the dead, dumbass.

2.  No, I’m serious.  That never turns out well.

3.  You see?  What did I tell you?  Why have no parents in the history of horror ever had as much sense as the ones in “The Monkey’s Paw” who wished their zombie kid away again?  Don’t people have to read that in grade school anymore?

4.  No, I said don’t bring people back from the dead, dumbass who is unable to learn from experience.

5.  And now you’re going to – Jesus Christ. I wash my hands of you, you nutcase.

Quick: which movie are you watching?  Pet Sematary or Wake Wood?

Really, I’d tell you the plot of Wake Wood but if you’ve seen Pet Sematary you’re pretty much familiar.  Eva Birthistle and her gratifyingly hot husband Aidan Gillen lose their nine-year-old daughter to a freak dog attack.  Trying to start over, they move to the small village of Wake Wood.  Strange Goings-On lead them to the discovery that the citizens of the village can bring people back from the dead – but only for three days, so you can say goodbye.  Sadly, they cannot guarantee that the aforementioned dead will return quite right.

Wake Wood is one of the first movies to come out of the resurrected Hammer Studios.  It’s not nearly as satisfactory as one would have hoped from that beloved studio.  The sad truth is that Wake Wood is derivative and unoriginal, offering nothing over the book version of Pet Sematary and nothing over the movie but Aidan Gillen’s glorious ass in jeans.   It doesn’t even have Fred Gwynne getting slaughtered by a toddler.

It wasn’t a bad movie.  It was a little slow in places, but the acting was good and the cinematography was moody and atmospheric.  The ending did not, as endings too often do, let the movie down with  a thud.  It’s just that there was nothing about it that didn’t leave me going “Yep, seen that before.”

So what’s the verdict?  Two stars. If I’d never seen Pet Sematary I probably would have liked it better, though I didn’t like the fact that the harm against animals seemed gratuitous even for the animal-hating horror industry.  It would have been much better if the filmmakers had just photoshopped Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle over Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby and re-released Pet Sematary instead.

Right to Die (2007)

And the 2007 Ed Gein Award for Least Competent Body Disposal in a Work of Film goes to… Dr. Cliff Addison!

Pity poor Cliff (Martin Donovan).  (Or don’t.  He’s a real dick.)  His wife Abbey (Julia Benson) gets hideously burned in a car accident that happened while he was driving.  He’s very sad about that, but he’s also going to be ten million dollars richer once the lawsuit against the car company goes through – unless his mother-in-law scores it with her media campaign to stop the Do Not Resuscitate order Cliff requested out of what, in fairness, certainly seemed to be a genuine desire to do right by his rather shallow wife.

Of course, that’s before he figures out that every time Abbey’s heart stops she slips the leash and starts killing people.  That realization’s a real game-changer.

“Right to Die” delivers the gory hilarity that “The Washingtonians” aimed for and missed.  Any show that gives me the glorious visual of severed body parts falling off the top of a SmartCar like plywood bits out of a broken IKEA crate pretty much wins that game; not to mention the sheer satisfaction of watching thoroughly unpleasant people die in creative ways.

Actually, I’m only assuming Abbey was an unpleasant person before the events of the movie.  I don’t even care.  I love her.  I want to have a standing Sunday brunch with her and watch her drown the barista in a terrible steamed-milk incident if he accidentally gives her soy instead of 2%.

So what’s the verdict?  Three stars.  Three and a half, let’s say.  I almost gave it four just for the sheer hilarity of the last ten or fifteen minutes.  If you like horror comedy, you’ll want to watch this one.

The Washingtonians (2007)

Here is a thing that bugs me: why are movie cannibals (Hannibal Lecter excepted, of course) all such sloppy eaters?  I mean, seriously.  Like, I get that it’s a foot, but you can’t eat it with a knife and fork, really?  And wipe your mouth once in a while?  Having your cannibals devour human flesh like pigs at a trough is not actually more disturbing than having them devour it a little more neatly, and the trough thing grosses me out for reasons you probably don’t want me focusing on while you’re trying to disturb me with cannibalism.

Anyway.  “The Washingtonians” centers around the idea that Washington and various other of the founding fathers were actually heinous cannibals.  The Franks family finds this out by accident when the father inherits his grandmother’s house with various historical artifacts inside – such as a fork made out of bone and a note from Washington saying something to the effect of “I will eat your children and make forks out of their bones!  Because I don’t have enough forks.  How is it that forks always disappear?  I swear they’re like socks in the dryer.”

(I can’t help but think that the plotline would have had more shock value thirty or forty years ago.  If there’s an American alive today who would put baby-eating past a politician, I don’t think we’ve met.)

Anyway, finding the letter puts the Franks in danger from a bewigged, weirdly powdered secret society sworn to protect the secret of the cannibalism, and things sort of deteriorate from there.

The Franks family is comprised of a wife I felt really sorry for (Venus Terzo), an annoying husband (Johnathon Schaech), and the whiniest, most timorous offspring I have seen in I don’t even know how long (Julia Tortolano).  My god, that kid irritated me.  By ten minutes into the show I wanted to lock her in a dark basement full of clown dolls until she either died of fright or kicked open the door, newly equipped with a spine and a chainsaw and ready to mow down zombies.

“The Washingtonians” is an episode of the made-for-cable Masters of Horror series, so it really wouldn’t be fair of me to fault it for the microbudget makeup and effects, or the bargain-basement actors (with the exception of Hey-It’s-That-Guy extraordinaire Saul Rubinek, whom I love in pretty much anything he does), but honestly those things really do diminish the enjoyment value of the episode.  Seriously, I’ve seen better production values in Supernatural episodes, so don’t tell me it can’t be done.

Further guilt about judging the episode harshly is brought on by the fact that it was directed by Peter Medak, otherwise known as the director of one of the few movies I will unstintingly give five stars to,  horror masterpiece The Changeling.  Either it’s amazing what a budget can do or Medak was just doing the paycheck walk through this one.  Either way, about the best that can be said for “The Washingtonians” is that it’s unobjectionable and mildly entertaining if you can get past the fact that not a single watchable character appears onscreen until Saul Rubinek shows up to save the day in more ways than one.

So what’s the verdict?  Two stars.  It’s okay.  It’s moderately amusing in a sort of lukewarm way. I wouldn’t watch it again, but it’s not terrible.  It was an interesting idea that fell down in the execution and then, as it was lying in the street, got run over by a clown car full of unimpressive actors and peed on by the Pomeranian of low-budget scripts.

Also, it turns out that the guy who plays Sam was in Cats and Dogs, a thing for which I am judging him in this world and God will judge him in the next.  Just saying.

Mine eyes have seen the glory

 

Oh my god, I am beside myself.  If this movie isn’t as epic and glorious as it looks I will actually cry right there in the theater so help me.

The Woman in Black (2012)

Dear Daniel Radcliffe,

I apologize for saying that you were such an atrociously wooden actor that you could have been swapped out for your polygon figure from the Harry Potter video games for three movies on end before anyone noticed.  Clearly that was a bias of mine formed back when you were ten years old and still had Chris Columbus telling you to act with your eyeballs.  Now that you have discovered that there are more facial expressions in an actor’s toolkit than bug-eyed-and-vaguely-bored and squinch-faced-and-vaguely-bored, you do pretty damn well.

I look forward to seeing you in more films.  Please do not dress in Victorian garb.  You are disturbingly attractive in it, and the cognitive dissonance is a bit more than I can handle.

Sincerely,

Larissa.

It’s a shame that the newly-resurrected Hammer didn’t come out of the starting gate with The Woman in Black, instead of leading with the direct-to-video Wake Wood  and the universally unloved The Resident.  That would have smashed off the coffin lid with a bang.  Woman in Black is a throwback to the gorgeous foggy creepiness of the best of the Hammer films, a claustrophobic gothic thriller that doesn’t rely on gore but on seriously disturbing imagery to keep the audience’s attention.  If it has a fault, it’s the ill-judged tendency to build up suspense with care, skill, and elegance, and then bring it crashing down with a cheap jump scare; but that’s easily forgiven in the sheer wonderfulness of seeing a good old-fashioned haunted-house story play out this beautifully on the screen.

Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a struggling attorney unable to get past his wife’s death in childbirth four years before.  He’s sent out to the creepy Drablow house in the middle of a marsh to collect the widow Drablow’s papers after her death.  (There are a million of them.  I wanted to sneeze just looking at the huge stacks of parchment.)  The house is creepy, the townspeople are terrified, and after Kipps sees a mysterious woman in black in the graveyard outside the mansion, children in the village start dying in horrific ways.

The last movie I watched that largely consisted of someone wandering around a creepy house was House of the Devil, a movie that bored me so badly that I still resent the fact that it exists.  The Woman in Black didn’t bore me for a minute; partly because this house genuinely was one of the creepiest houses ever committed to celluloid, and partly because Radcliffe has against all reason managed to grow into a charismatic and compelling, if travel-sized, screen presence.  The cinematography is deft and in places astonishing to watch – this is probably the only movie I’ve ever seen that manages to make handwriting terrifying.  It’s definitely a blu-ray buy, both for the quality of the performances and the sheer visual spectacle of it.

If you’re a horror buff, though, there’s one outstanding question: how well does it hold up to the original?  Well… that depends on what you thought the original’s strong points were.  I liked the original, but while it had a couple of seriously disturbing moments (which the 2012 movie has the good sense to allude to but not try to replicate), I didn’t think it was as scary as it’s usually built up to be.  I like Radcliffe’s Arthur better than the original’s – he’s more three-dimensional and less passive.  I can’t decide which version’s woman in black I like better.  The new one definitely has more going on and a faster pace, which may strike you as pandering to the short attention spans of modern audiences or may strike you as better at keeping the audience wrapped up in the movie every step of the way.  I liked the original; I was going to say I like the remake better, but I like them for such different reasons that it sort of seems like comparing apples and oranges.  The only thing to do is to buy both of them, stock up on the popcorn, and spend a long winter evening comparing and contrasting.

So what’s the verdict?  Four stars.  If you love gothic movies, haunted-house movies, or both, The Woman in Black is a must-see.

Ninjas vs Vampires (2010)

Ninjas vs Vampires juuust misses greatness by, say, 35 minutes.

I didn’t know anything about it going in and was, to put it mildly, not expecting much; but the movie got on my good side in the very first scene, which was a vampire slaughtering a girl wearing an “I ♥ Edward” t-shirt, and for a while it just went uphill from there.  The main action starts out with…

…Okay, let me see how much of this I can keep straight with almost no cast pictures on IMDB.  I’m so awful with names that I just don’t even try anymore.

Anyway.  The action starts out with the lead guy, who is probably Aaron (Jay Saunders), proposing relationshiphood to his best friend, whose name may or may not be Ann (Melissa McConnell, possibly, but whoever it is has a thankless role that largely consists of pretending to forget what everyone was talking about two seconds before).  The proposition does not go well, so it’s probably just as well that they’re abruptly attacked by the most hilariously scene-chewing vampires since Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  But!  Suddenly they’re saved by ninjas!  Well, sort of ninjas.  It’s two white frat guys, a female vampire who doesn’t drink human blood for some reason, and a witch who looks like her role ought to be just to stand there and remind us of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  But they do martial arts a lot.

Wanting to figure out what’s going on, Aaron winds up hooking up with the sort-of-ninjas just in time to get sucked into some sort of ill-defined war between them and the Vampire Overlord (P.J. Megaw, who manages to recite the most absolutely inane dialogue in a way that… well, okay, it’s still wooden.  But it’s highly glossed and beautifully carved wood, wood that gleams in the lamplight as if to say “Look what an awesome example of the woodcarver’s art I am.”  It is wood with no higher goal than to be the very best wood it can be, and it does a pretty damn fine job).  His sidekick, I swear to God, is like The Vampire Snooki.  I love her.  The whole movie could have been about her and I would have been happy.

Aaron, as I say, hooks up with the ninjas, manages to become a ninja himself through virtue of some unconvincing special effects on the witch’s part, and follows them through a number of ridiculous fight scenes and glorious geek in-jokes until the vampires kill one of the ninjas and kidnap Aaron’s girlfriend, kick-starting the Final Battle.  I don’t know, it’s not one of those movies you can describe.  It has to be experienced.

On most levels the movie succeeds beyond the wildest expectations that could reasonably be attached to its $15,000 budget.  The acting is a sight better than I’ve seen in a lot of movies with ten times the money to blow.  The special effects are less heinous than might be expected.  The jokes are actually funny.  The plot is inane, but if you are expecting deep plot from a movie called Ninjas vs Vampires then I do not know what to tell you.  The real problem is that at a run time of 89 minutes, the movie outstays its welcome.  If it were a 30-minute short then it would be an invaluable gem, partly because there wouldn’t have been time for the obligatory Scenes of Great Pathos which are frankly almost never a good idea in comedy and don’t work here either.  To be honest, I’m not sure why it wasn’t a 30-minute short; it’s not as if it was going to open on four screens in every cineplex in the country.

Despite its mild drag, though, the movie is great fun, and definitely worth a watch if only for the first 30 minutes or so.

So what’s the verdict?  Two stars.  It would have earned another one if half the length and all of the Srs Bizns scenes had been edited out.  Still, I was entertained enough by it that I might try to track down Ninjas vs Zombies, the first film in the franchise, which is sadly on neither Netflix nor Amazon Instant Video.

 

Haunting of Winchester House (2009)

I spent a lot of time looking at this movie in genuine bewilderment and saying, out loud, “Are you serious right now?”  I never got an answer.  I suspect the answer was no.  That suspicion is in fact the only thing saving this movie from the coveted zero-star rating; that and the conviction that everyone involved in the movie had a lot more fun making it than I had watching it. In fact, I was left with many more questions than answers.  Deep, philosophical questions such as:

• Why does Ghostbuster Dude recite all his lines as if he were being badly dubbed over a kung fu movie from 1978?
• Wait.  Why does that ghost know what they’re looking for?
• Is that supposed to be a puppet?  An alien puppet?
• Does Tuberculosis Guy think that boxes become different boxes if you turn them sideways?
• What does any of this have to do with people who were killed by Winchester rifles?
• Why are there teenagers in roles that appear to be written for six-year-olds?
• Does that woman seriously think a cop with a knife through her throat is going to answer questions about where her kid is?
• This looks like someone thinks it’s going to be a twist.  Is it supposed to be a twist?
• Okay, I got the “twist.”  Can you stop explaining it to me now, please?
• How is that greenscreen so bad?  This movie has the worst effects I have seen in I don’t know how long.
• What is that woman even doing right now?  What are they supposed to do, wander around there forever?
• And finally but most pertinently: what in blue hell were the filmmakers trying to do with this?

I fear none of these questions will ever be answered.  That’s okay.  I’m not all that interested in the answers, to tell the truth.

So what’s the verdict?  One star, but I honestly feel a little bad about it.  The goofiness level in this movie is so high that I can’t imagine anyone involved with it took it seriously.  It didn’t even insult my intelligence; it just sort of… refused to engage with my intelligence. It’s like this movie exists in a happy little world where intelligence does not exist, nor things like coherent plots and well-done CGI, and the worst thing ghosts ever do is wander around in bad rubber masks going “RARR!” half-heartedly at you from across the room.  I feel sort of bad for introducing criticism into that good-natured, inoffensive place.

On the other hand, this is a really damn terrible movie.  If you’re in the mood for something like this, dig up that old Disney movie, Child of Glass.  I loved that shit when I was a kid.

Insidious (2010)

I loved Insidious, but man, does that movie ride on a catastrophe curve.  I can easily imagine circumstances under which it would really have pissed me off.  Without giving too much in the way of spoilers, the third act takes a pretty sharp left turn from the ghost-story genre to something closer to the dark-fantasy genre, and also switches POV characters. If you’re willing to take that left turn along with it, you’ll probably love the movie too, or at least not hate it.  If you’re not, Insidious will leave you in the dust with no real resolution to the great ghost story you were watching, and you’ll probably be pretty annoyed.

In a lot of ways the film feels like watching a sort of updated re-envisioning of Poltergeist with younger kids and creepier ghosts.  Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) and their three kids are the suburban Everyfamily, just moved into a new house; Josh is a high school teacher and Renai is a songwriter.  (Apparently a successful one, because no way did they afford that house on a high school teacher’s salary.  Five high school teachers living in sin with a Maserati salesman could not afford that house.)  I liked the Lamberts – they’re immediately engaging and have enough chemistry with each other that they feel like a real family.  And man, could I ever relate to Renai’s battles with voice-driven menu systems on customer service lines.  Those things hate me too, Renai.

Then the oldest boy, Dalton, falls off a ladder in the attic and whacks his head.  He seems fine, but in the morning he won’t wake up, despite the inability of doctors to figure out what’s wrong with him.  And then creepy things start happening in earnest, and man, are they creepy. I can’t even really describe them without spoiling them, but there are not just jump scares but some terrifically scary set pieces.  Eventually it reaches a point where the Lamberts are so freaked out that they do what I swear no horror-movie family has done before or since: they move out of the damn house.

Unfortunately for them, the creepy happenings just follow them.

Almost everything in Insidious just plain works.  The effects are good.  The sound work is amazing.  The scares are scary.  The soundtrack cost me a lot of money when I had to go buy Ludovico Einaudi’s entire collected works.  The Lamberts are sympathetic and convincing.  Barbara Hershey is amazing in the unexpectedly important role of Josh’s mother, and Lin Shaye brings a presence to the Obligatory Quirky Psychic role that somehow manages to minimize the role’s resemblance to Tangina in Poltergeist.  There’s a plot point reveal scene involving Josh looking through photos from his childhood that is genuinely one of the creepiest moments I’ve seen in a movie.

Unfortunately, what does not work – and it really does not work – is the main villain.  I, too, loved Darth Maul.  I just don’t know that I’d put a tribute character in the central bad-guy role of a movie in a completely different genre.  I’m just saying.

Still, the rest of Insidious works well enough to overcome even that not inconsiderable handicap.  And when your movie is working well enough to get people past not only the déjà vu caused by the resemblance to Poltergeist but also that moment of “What the hell is Darth Maul doing in this movie?” then overall you’re probably doing a whole lot of things very right.

So what’s the verdict?  Four stars.  I might even have given it five, but I felt like something really needed to be deducted for the Darth Maul misstep and the abrupt switchover in POV characters.

Actually I almost deducted another star for the costume designer or whoever it was in the special features talking about how the creepy old woman was actually played by a man.  Because it’s creepy!  You can’t tell if it’s a woman or a man!  IT’S A MAN IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES, OMG, WHAT COULD BE ICKIER AND CREEPIER?

Well, you and your gross transphobic issues, is what.  But that’s on you, not on the movie, so the rating stays where it is.