Wes Craven Presents “They”

A Review

by Mighty Doom

            This movie brings to mind a line from Wesley Willis’ song “Kill Whitey”: “You are full of dog shit! You are a STUPID motherfucker!”

            Wes Craven is becoming shittier every year.  Having directed A Nightmare on Elm Street, he has subsequently inflicted upon us such gems as Wishmaster, Shocker and Vampire in Brooklyn.  Sure, once in a while he hits the nail on the head (The People Under the Stairs is one of my favorite early-90s B-movies), but it’s undeniable that his career of late has been rather tame and, worse, shitty.  Yet I cannot help but feel a spark of pity for the man.  With the release of his latest film, Wes Craven Presents “They,” his name will be further tarnished – and he didn’t have a damn thing to do with the film! He’s not even an executive producer! Wes Craven could just “present” us with one of his own massive turds.  He would have more to do with its production, and it would have the same basic effect on his audience as this movie.

            They features Laura Regan (Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Julia Lund, an aspiring psychologist who gets a faceful of blood when her childhood friend Billy shoots himself in front of her in the middle of a crowded diner after babbling a warning about something that’s been hunting him down.  He cautions Julia that these unseen forces affect electrical devices (the city has been experiencing frequent blackouts) and babies (who start crying when they’re around).  Julia meets a couple of Billy’s friends, Sam and Terry, who experienced the same childhood night terrors as Julia and Billy.  The three begin to suspect that something is, in fact, amiss.

            Julia’s boyfriend Paul doesn’t believe her, and his obnoxious, beer-swilling roommates couldn’t care less.  Sam and Terry vanish, and Julia is next on the list.  “They,” if we’re to understand the speculation of the doomed trio, are demons that live under your bed and in the closet.  On the other hand, maybe they’re aliens.  The screenwriter certainly isn’t offering any insight into the matter, and the director seems content to ride Craven’s name into the pile of money at the bottom of this shit-covered Slip ‘n’ Slide.

            Wow, do I love screaming, hysterical women.  The high-pitched squealing, the shrill chatter that makes me want to drive railroad spikes into my ears – it’s so entertaining we should make a movie about it! To replicate the aural experience that is They, lock yourself in your bathroom, set up a microphone and smack it against the wall until it starts making that annoying screeching feedback noise.  Then leave it on for an hour and forty minutes.  No doubt about who you’re going to cheer for in this movie.  You go, They, please rip out her vocal cords first.

            Even without Julia’s constant high-pitched guinea-pig babble, there’s still the inexplicable stupidity of every character in the film to get in the way of your enjoyment.  It’s absolutely maddening, and not in a tense “Don’t go in there” context so much as “Just fucking die already, idiot.” One scene finds Julia in her bathroom.  She hears a gurgling noise from the sink and goes to look down the drain.  The sink vomits up a gob of black goo.  Then she hears a noise in the medicine cabinet, and SHE OPENS IT.  Of course she finds a horrible black slime dimension with crawling things on the walls, but she FUCKING REACHES INTO IT ANYWAY.  In a similar sequence of cheap scare tactics, Terry is alone in her apartment when she hears a noise in her heating duct.  Being astonishingly stupid, she STICKS HER DAMN HEAD IN and doesn’t even take it out when she sees something black and slithery inside! No, she has to flick her Zippo lighter about fifty times to see what it is.  My God, I could feel my brain cells dying by example.

            People are always doing shit like that in this movie.  You wish they would all suffer horribly and die, just so you won’t have to watch them anymore, but They is rated PG-13, so there’s not even any gore or nudity to sweeten the pot.  There’s also no reason whatsoever why the film should follow Julia as opposed to Sam or Terry.  She doesn’t triumph.  She ends up dead.  She just happens to last a bit longer, and that’s not quite enough to make me any more interested in her than in any of the film’s other inevitable casualties.

            They could have been an interesting take on the long-term effects of childhood fears, or missing children.  When all is said and done, however, there are far better movies out there that tackle similar subject matter.  Pitch Black was hardly original, but it was beautifully shot, had a sense of humor and the aliens were cute.  The Mothman Prophecies was an incredibly creepy and claustrophobic movie, far scarier than the over-hyped The Ring.  The strange occurrences in Mothman went unexplained – but the characters reached a sort of personal resolution.  They offers no explanation, but it’s simply not interesting enough otherwise not to.

            In conclusion, this film is bothersome to Doom.  They is not (Shouldn’t that be “are not?” I don’t know.  God, what a stupid title.) worth the price of admission and 102 minutes of his time.  The staggering grammatical implications of its title aside, it’s not scary, and it’s not funny, intentionally or otherwise.  I am looking forward to the forthcoming Darkness Falls, if only because it features an evil tooth fairy.  That will be super.