FrightFest Halloween review – Catch a Killer
NB: not to be confused with the Shailene Woodley/Ben Mendelsohn thriller To Catch a Killer (or the Brian Dennehy John Wayne Gacy TV movie of a generation ago) or the South African-set TV series Catch Me a Killer … though since they both get listed above it if you search for this title, maybe settling on this monicker wasn’t such a hot idea.
Writer-director Teddy Grennan’s referential serial killer picture is at once convoluted and naïve – you just have to ignore contrivances, unlikelinesses, oh-come-on-now-you-have-got-to-be-kidding plot devices and a kind of unearned anguish which can generously be deemed a homage to David Fincher’s Se7en but doesn’t really gel with the sweet central performance of Sam Brooks as Otto, a crime scene cleanup guy who is a cop suspended because of accusations made by a manipulative, stalkery older officer (Tommi Rose) and desperate to get back on the force. Otto, a stoner horror movie fan, works out that an array of murders committed in the nameless city are restagings of moments from classic horror films at addresses cribbed form the movies – The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Scream, etc. The latest killings – perhaps confusingly – homage a recent film called Skull & Bones, which seems not to be the gay campus horror from 2007 and definitely isn’t the pirate movie from 2024.
Otto’s pregnant high-school-age girlfriend Lex (Tu Morrow) and co-worker Jane (Grace Chang) help out his sleuthing – and, yes, it would in the real world be a problem if a probational police officer were constantly high on weed and had knocked up a schoolgirl, but here these are admirable character traits. No one acts believably, including the cop on the case (Michael Weaver), but somehow every beat of the story is telegraphed so the audience can work out the solution – a minor mystery is how the killer gets access to the victims’ homes without breaking in – well before Otto tumbles. And the solution raises a key question – who taped the cardboard boxes shut? – which the film is too busy being edgy and sketchy and creepy to address. It’s short enough not to be painful and has some smart moments, but works best as a joke at the expense of the contrived serial killer scenarios of films like Se7en – frankly, if looked at closely, John Doe’s scheme is just as loopy, difficult and dependent on other characters acting like complete idiots as the great plan put into action by the movie murderer of Catch a Killer. With Joshua Leonard and a Blair Witch joke.
It has micro-clips from a few films – A Nightmare on Elm Street is rather cruelly represented by its worst special effect – but either didn’t have the budget for too many or didn’t want to invite too many invidious comparisons. The movie fan cosplay killer has precedents in the suppressed Murder Set Pieces, Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? and others.
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