I do not have a ton of bar experience. I am not a big drinker nor a lover of being in a public space. Of course, despite these two things, I have spent quite a bit of time in bars. In my late teenage years, I hung around with an older community theater crowd called the Mobtown Players. They were in their thirties and I was in my teens. I hung out in bars with them even though I was not allowed to drink. My mother trusted them and me and they assured her that they would never let me drink underage. Later, I spent time in one particular bar in college both before and after I was old enough to drink. It was a dive bar named Dolls that unfortunately was not full of dolls of any kind. I usually retreated to a less populated corner and clung to what friends I could find. I nursed one beer to look like I belonged. Even later, I hung out in another dive bar for pub trivia. Again, I did not really drink but having an activity made bar visits more tolerable.
How much do you think that you can rely on strangers in public when bad things happen? I would like to think that I could rely on people that I have never met. Unfortunately, the statistics are against me on that. First, we have the bystander effect which says that bystanders will generally just watch something bad happen and none of them will act because they assume somebody else already did or is about to. Am I any different? No. I have never stopped on the side of the road to ask a stranded motorist if they need help. I generally freeze when a crissis hits. However, I like to think that if things truly became life or death, I would leap into action and everybody would join me. Obviously, I hope I never find out.
The first thing I noticed was the comedy of the movie with a lot of meta humor and goofy 2000s flavor. This is an ensemble piece with almost everybody getting a nickname instead of their actual name. The dialogue is comically cliched but in the best ways. Navi Rawat plays the lead, a stereotypical final girl with sass and grit. Jason Mewes plays himself and is just as goofy as usual. Judah Friedlander is full of comic relief slapstick and is just as sarcastic as he usually is. Henry Rollins plays a douchebag tough guy. Clu Galager plays the tough-as-nails old bartender. Eric Dane is the tough hero-type guy. Jenny Wade plays the dumb blonde waitress. Balthazar Getty plays an asshole bar fly while Josh Zuckerman plays his nice brother.
This is a pretty gory movie in both senses of the word. There is a lot of over-the-top gore and all of it is really fun to watch. Think of movies like Evil Dead 2 or Dead Alive. The practical effects are great and they are obviously doing a lot with animatronics and prosthetics. There are also plenty of other fluids flying around. The cast gets pretty gross pretty quickly. The monsters look really great with some varying designs and all of them are something you absolutely do not want to see in a dark alley. I also really like what we get to see of the monster lore because they are absolutely wild. There is some real nastiness and this movie is pretty cruel to its cast of characters.
Overall, I liked this weird movie. It takes a lot of elements and tropes of the under-siege horror movie and turns them on their ear while also playing some of them deadly straight. The result is a movie that does not take itself too seriously but also ends up being fairly bleak while also being funny. It is an innovative script with a lot of actors who are willing to play it to the hilt. I recommend this but not for the squeamish.