Two stars.
This movie has been savaged quite a bit by many, many, many reviewers. And rightfully so. I'm being generous with my rating. Despite so many of the things that are bad about it, Grimcutty's premise was fascinating enough to hold my interest for a limited amount.
For instance, one of the huge criticisms is the crappy CGI monster. It's cheesy as all get out, but I did like it as a villain. Grimcutty is an amalgamation of memes and creepypastas (Jeff the Killer and Slenderman come to mind). It's definitely intimidating and the appearances (sporadic as they may be) reminded me a lot of the monster from It Follows. The creature tends to show up at random intervals in a similar way, which becomes quite jarring. Curiously enough, it's established this thing can be affected physically and vice versa. Eventually, a couple of the parents see this creature physically attack people.
This movie has been savaged quite a bit by many, many, many reviewers. And rightfully so. I'm being generous with my rating. Despite so many of the things that are bad about it, Grimcutty's premise was fascinating enough to hold my interest for a limited amount.
For instance, one of the huge criticisms is the crappy CGI monster. It's cheesy as all get out, but I did like it as a villain. Grimcutty is an amalgamation of memes and creepypastas (Jeff the Killer and Slenderman come to mind). It's definitely intimidating and the appearances (sporadic as they may be) reminded me a lot of the monster from It Follows. The creature tends to show up at random intervals in a similar way, which becomes quite jarring. Curiously enough, it's established this thing can be affected physically and vice versa. Eventually, a couple of the parents see this creature physically attack people.
But overall, the movie does irritate the fuck out of me. Let me count the ways.
To begin with, this film can't decide if it's an attack on helicopter parenting or the over obsession with narcissistic content creation and social media obsession with today's youth. The story starts off with Asha Chaundry (Wolfkind), a high schooler that's recently quit running in track and has started making ASMR videos. This is complete with whispering and other annoying crap that drives the viewer squirrel-nut crazy. Her parents are concerned with her online obsessions and work desperately to stymie this by phone confiscations for the purposes of "detoxing." To make matters worse, her father Amir (Ally) is an overbearing cocksucker that constantly holds her brother up as an example of why she needs to do better. Without giving too much away, he becomes the focal point of why the creature begins to begin more aggressive, as it feeds on parental paranoia. Her mother Leah (Sossamon) is the more sympathetic of the two, but she's almost as insufferable as her husband until halfway through the movie. It was good to see Sossamon show up in a role again because she's a good actress that never quite rose above b-status. But the material she works with here does her no service. This movie begins and ends with severely unlikable characters.
Anyway, tensions mount when the Chaundry family goes full crazy upon hearing about an Elmo-esque online challenge, eponymously named for the title character. About seven-eighth's of the town does so as well. Upon this development, stories about teenager appear right and left that are reputed to have self-inflicted injuries. This is shown when Asha goes to a school assembly, where most of the students have been held back at home.
Because of an person attack by Grimcutty and the refusal by her dad to let the household continue to use electronic devices, Asha and her newfound friend Cassidy go to a teen house party celebrating the deadly meme. Why go do this in a middle of a party you might ask? So they can borrow the resident douchebag's laptop and wifi. Evidently, there was nowhere else they could sneak access to the net like, I don't know, a library? They discover the parents are getting their child rearing tips from some pumpkin-spice latte sipping blogger, who had previously written about Grimcutty. However, any information pertaining to the monster has been removed. Immediately after this, Asha is attacked by our villain in front of the other partying Gen Z'rs.
Asha drives to meet the blogger, who she discovers is imprisoning her son in a self-made rubber room because he had stabbed her weeks earlier. This leads to her mother showing up and vague exposition given for the monster after a violent confrontation with the blogger. However, no origin is ever explicitly given as to where the meme came from, why Grimcutty showed up, etc. That begins and ends with this specific scene. The rest of the movie proceeds from here, with Asha's dad going off the deep-end, teenagers flooding the hospitals and the climax of the movie.
Because of an person attack by Grimcutty and the refusal by her dad to let the household continue to use electronic devices, Asha and her newfound friend Cassidy go to a teen house party celebrating the deadly meme. Why go do this in a middle of a party you might ask? So they can borrow the resident douchebag's laptop and wifi. Evidently, there was nowhere else they could sneak access to the net like, I don't know, a library? They discover the parents are getting their child rearing tips from some pumpkin-spice latte sipping blogger, who had previously written about Grimcutty. However, any information pertaining to the monster has been removed. Immediately after this, Asha is attacked by our villain in front of the other partying Gen Z'rs.
Asha drives to meet the blogger, who she discovers is imprisoning her son in a self-made rubber room because he had stabbed her weeks earlier. This leads to her mother showing up and vague exposition given for the monster after a violent confrontation with the blogger. However, no origin is ever explicitly given as to where the meme came from, why Grimcutty showed up, etc. That begins and ends with this specific scene. The rest of the movie proceeds from here, with Asha's dad going off the deep-end, teenagers flooding the hospitals and the climax of the movie.
The story constantly makes you wonder if it was produced by AI rather than actual writers, given the strange flow and the inconsistency in the story telling. It's no wonder so many people were pissed off when watching this when it dropped back in October. In my opinion, it has no real resolution, there's no effort to untangle the mystery of where a 7-ft tooth monster came from, the movie just fades out. Watch only if you have nothing else to do and you're incessantly scrolling through the lame-ass horror selection on Hulu.
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