My Shudder Pick of the Month is the Darkly Funny 2019 Horror Comedy Villains
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I like writing up a different Shudder entry every month for this column because I love horror and, full disclosure, I need the money, but also because it takes me back to my early days of writing video reviews for The A.V. Club.
New releases came out on Tuesday. So every week I would head down to Blockbuster or Four Star Video Heaven, places where I had previously worked, to see if anything intrigued me.
I am strangely nostalgic for those days. I saw a lot of crap that way. If a direct-to-video movie had anything going for it, I would probably review it for The A.V. Club’s video section.
That includes an appearance by Eric Roberts. That was enough to garner a review back in the late 1990s.
Flipping through Shudder feels like a twenty-first century, digital-age way of skipping merrily through the aisles of Blockbuster in search of colorful crap to cover.
Today, the darkly comic 2019 horror movie Villains caught my attention. It belongs to a subgenre of horror movies/thrillers where criminals and other dark souls find a place to hide away from busybodies and law enforcement, only to realize that they’ve stumbled into a situation far more dangerous and terrifying than the one they’ve fled.
The surprise 2016 blockbuster Don’t Breathe is a prominent example of this subgenre. It focused on three young criminals who break into the home of a blind man, only to discover that he’s considerably better at killing than they are.
Villains bears an even more remarkable resemblance to a stinker that I covered early in Travolta/Cage/The Travolta/Cage Project called Grand Aisle. I don’t want to brag, but I could be the world’s biggest Grand Aisle expert.
I’ve written about it three times. That’s three times more than anyone else! First, I covered it as a bonus entry for The Travolta/Cage Project/Travolta/Cage. Then I wrote it up when we hit 2019 in the timeline.
The third, seemingly final time I wrote about Grand Aisle was when I was fact-checking my second write-up and found a fascinatingly incorrect AI article on the movie that got the ending completely, surreally wrong.
A drunken degenerate played by Nicolas Cage and his horny Southern belle wife are Grand Aisle’s cartoonish villains while a desperate loner is its anti-hero. In the kooky AI article, the dynamic is reversed. Cage’s creep and his even more appalling spouse are serial killers who keep child prey in their basement in the movie, but they’re secretly heroes in the AI’s take.
In Villains, horror heroes Bill Skarsgård of It and Nosferatu fame and hipster Scream Queen Maika Monroe (Longlegs, It Follows, The Guest) play Mickey and Jules, respectively. They’re small time criminals who are horny for each other, horny for crime and horny for life.
The crazy kids can’t keep their hands off one another. Jules is irrevocably drawn to her boyfriend’s dong. She wants to give him a blow job while he’s driving, which fans will remember as the catalyst behind all of the ugliness in Tom Holland’s 1996 adaptation of Stephen King’s Thinner.
En route to Florida, their car runs out of gas. They find refuge in a large, seemingly empty house with some curious features, most notably a silent little girl chained up in the basement.
To paraphrase the album of a Marjoe Gortner album, Mickey and Jules (both names with tremendous meaning in the Quentin Tarantino universe) are bad, but they’re not evil.
Being decent human beings, the robbers on the run want to save the girl. They want to liberate her from her prison and take her with them to the promised land of Florida.
They naturally assume that she wants freedom and will welcome them as saviors. It's not that easy. The dirty, despondent little girl proves an enigmatic figure. Is she being chained up as a form of abuse or because she poses a danger to others?
This is a horror film and a dark comedy, so it is at least possible that she’s a werewolf.
Our anti-heroes discover that the little girl is not alone. They’re unhappily introduced to the house’s owners, George (Jeffrey Donovan), a Southern gentleman with a lilting drawl and ominous air, and his even creepier, even more unsettling wife, Gloria (Kyra Sedgwick).
Sedgwick’s sinister Southern belle has crazy eyes, a crazy face, and a crazy body. She’s sending out crazy vibes so massive that they can be seen from space.
It doesn’t take long for Jules and Mickey to figure out that they’re not guests of George and Gloria; they’re captives, all too aware that they could end up alongside the little girl in the basement.
Gloria is sexual and maternal in equal measures. She’s sexual in a disconcertingly maternal way. She’s so ineffably off that we quickly ascertain that the “baby” that she is holding is less a flesh and blood human being than a manifestation of her madness and loneliness.
A home that initially appears to offer escape and a haven for two desperate criminals on the run becomes a deadly trap once the younger couple realizes that, when it comes to committing crimes and unspeakable transgressions, their hostile hosts make them look like amateurs by comparison.
Mickey and Jules might be bad, but George and Julia are evil. They have blood on their hands and an impressive body count that they’re eager to increase.
George tries to project an avuncular air of country-fried authority, but it’s clear from his first moment onscreen that the mask of sanity he adopts for the sake of his unwanted visitors is just that: a cynical fiction.
As the evening progresses, dark secrets emerge that provide an origin story for the couples’ evil and insanity. It’s rooted irrevocably in loneliness and want. Julia couldn’t conceive a child the organic way, so she’s intent on making the world suffer.
Though they have the same broad strokes, Villains is infinitely superior to Grand Aisle because the filmmakers wisely choose to play their darkly comic scenario for pitch-black laughs rather than seedy sexual melodrama.
The four leads are perfectly cast, particularly Donovan, who has the distinction of playing JFK and RFK in LBJ and J. Edgar, respectively. It’s a broad, theatrical heel turn. He and his wife want a family above all else, but they go about it in the worst possible way.
I don’t want to oversell Villains, but it’s a nifty little movie that sustains a nicely nasty premise for an hour and a half. It’s a dark comedy of amorality and brutality populated by deeply flawed opportunists jockeying for position and fighting for survival.
Villains is a painless way to waste an hour and a half. It’s an engagingly bleak distraction, which is just what I was looking for.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here.