Fiction and reality blurs when a group of friends take part in an immersive horror movie experience.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ashley Cahill
Starring: Shane Graham, Al Dollar, Mabel Thomas, Allison Gold, Neeley Dayan, Julia Clarke, Alex J. Joseph
With the rise in popularity of horror-themed attractions, it's no surprise that several horror movies have deployed such settings as backdrops for bloodshed. For one, it's a great way to evoke that cosy Halloween atmosphere in which horror fans love to bask every October, and it allows a filmmaker to use a smoke machine without some smartass audience member asking where the smoke is coming from.
Once Upon a Time in a Horror Movie makes effective use of its horror attraction setting, writer/director Ashley Cahill bathing his fake set within a fake set in moody smog and using the sort of garish lighting schemes that look great on screen but wouldn't make sense in a real world setting.
The initial setup is one that we've become familiar with over the last decade, that of a horror theme park finding itself the setting for real life horror. Here it's an attraction that promises customers the experience of living inside an '80s slasher movie. A group of twentysomethings arrive in search of thrills, and they've come dressed as the classic slasher movie stereotypes of the mousy final girl, the slutty cheerleader, the jock etc. They're taken under the wing of park manager Erika (Mabel Thomas), who treats them to a detour to a real life house of horrors - the former home of a maniac who murdered his parents in their kitchen. What nobody realises is that said lunatic has just escaped from an asylum and has made his way back to the scene of the crime.
Cahill is by no means the first filmmaker to employ this fake scares meets real death premise, but he uses it in a smarter way than we've previously seen. The opening act, in which the promised fake '80s slasher experience seems to turn into something closer to a '70s rednecksploitation thriller, mines tension as we try to figure out what's real and what's simply part of Erika's show. Once all is revealed and we know exactly who the villain is, the tension doesn't let up, with various masked "killers" roaming the property, corn syrup mixing with real blood as the two cross paths.
The setup allows Cahill to have fun playing around with our expectations of how certain character types typically fare in slasher movies. The characters here might be dressed as the expected stereotypes, but they don't easily fit into their costumes. This means anyone can die at any time, and we're kept on our toes as we try to figure out who the real final girl (or boy) will be. You'll be genuinely shocked at a couple of the kills, with one in particular crossing a line that is generally considered taboo.
The budget clearly didn't stretch to hiring a Tom Savini level gore guru, but Cahill makes up for what he can't explicitly show with some great use of crunchy and gooey sound effects (I bet the foley artist had a blast on this production), though there is one satisfyingly grisly bit of eye trauma late on.
The movie ups the ante in a finale that reworks famous set-pieces from Cujo and Jurassic Park, dogs and dinos replaced here with a lumbering masked killer. There's a level of craft in the staging of these sequences that we don't usually see in low budget slashers. Once Upon a Time in a Horror Movie might riff on exploitation cinema, but Cahill has clearly made this out of love for the genre, and that affection translates into a postmodern slasher that makes for ideal spooky season viewing.
