 James Wan is back with Malignant. He's writing, directing, and kind of going back to his roots. And for me personally, I think this is one of James Wan's most brilliant films yet. Why? Well, because not only does he tell the new story, but he also makes me reflect back on his earlier stuff and think to myself, man, I would rather saw my own foot off than have to sit through this shit again. He brought it full circle. Well done, James. Scary movies are great, aren't they? You know what else is great? Listening to movie critics, especially those that don't take things so seriously like myself. So why don't you do me a favor and grab your favorite hatchet, take a big swing, and hack at that subscribe button. It only takes one hit to make it count. Actually two, I think, will unsubscribe. So just do one solid, hearty subscription hit. My daughter, my wife, and myself were treated to this film Friday night at the house on HBO Max. We shut off all the lights. We got into the blankets. We got in the mindset of scare me, James. Please scare me like you did with the Conjuring. Get me in a creepy mood. Bring me into that atmosphere, into that world. We didn't have to deal with people talking in the theater, chewing on their popcorn noisily, looking at their phones. No! Instead, we had a very pleasant and comfortable experience watching it right on our own couch via that great HBO Max app that only failed on us three times during the movie. Why is that app so terrible? You might have to tell me if I'm getting a little too dramatic, but that HBO Max app makes me want to kill myself. Yeah, I think I hear it. I think I hear the drama. We're gonna start spoiler-free, but we're gonna make our way into some spoilers later. I will let you know. For this first half of the review, I'm just going to tell you some of the pros and cons. It's mostly cons. Give you a little bit of warning what to expect. The film can really be broken in two parts. Part one, the mystery. Part two, the further disappointment of the mystery. I've been around the block a few times, so I've seen a lot of these types of movies and I called the twist or the reveal or whatever you want to know it as about 15 to 20 minutes into the film. So then watching the next 45 minutes of people getting to the conclusion I've already reached was a bit of a chore, especially when nothing exciting is happening in that time period. Our lead character is Madison. She's in an abusive relationship. She's actually in a couple. Let's keep going. Early on in the picture, something very disturbing takes place in the house, which forces Madison to make the tough decision. Does she go back to the house or does she go? Nope, there's no decision. She goes right back to the house to spend another night there, to just live there, even after something very horrific happens. That's how people react! The only real person in her life is her sister Sydney. They kind of only have each other as we find out later when Sydney goes to an abandoned building alone in the middle of the dark, in the middle of the night. No friends, I guess, to come along with her. She's gonna enter in a sane asylum alone to look for clues for things. That makes sense. This is how people act in real life. It's relatable. The only other real characters in the film are a couple of cops. Pretty lame. One of them's a budget Wanda Sykes. I truly thought it was Wanda Sykes for a little while, and I'm just thinking like, how old is Wanda right now? This woman kind of looks like her, kind of sounds like her. It's just a bad impression, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, the plot in a nutshell is Madison, after this horrific experience takes place, is able to see further killings happen, like she's in the room with them. James Wan learned a new film trick, probably from his time on Aquaman, and he uses it four or five times, the same thing every single time. Madison looks around at the room she's in, which then starts to change on the fly to the room that she's going to be in, that she's gonna see through. It's a really cool effect the first time, but then you start to get sick of it pretty quick after that. I really like those Conjuring movies, the first two, so it's a shame that he's fallen back so far in this one. This really is a Saw 2.0 for me, where the look of the film is just kind of cheap, it has a cheapness to it. There's no atmosphere in the movie outside of one scene. There was one scene total where I was a little bit nervous, a little bit scared, where a guy enters a closet, and you're like, uh-oh, where is the killer? Is he in the closet? Is he outside? That was an intense 20 to 30 seconds of the film. The music is comically bad. It goes from zero to 100 like a flip of a coin, it's just like And again, like Saw, the acting is also pretty bad, shockingly bad for a movie of this caliber. I truly don't know anymore. I saw some reviews on Twitter, I feel like they're always just fake, because no one can be that goddamn stupid with their thoughts. Someone was like, this is the most intense thriller I've ever seen, shockingly horrific, frightening beyond compare. Have you never seen a movie? It's not scary in the slightest. Creativity, not so much. Makeup, clothing, awful, especially in the second half, it's seriously comically bad. I was laughing during the scenes toward the last act, and if it's intentional, cool, why? Who's this for? I don't know. I hated this movie. My wife hated it. My daughter hated it. Three different walks of life with different tastes. So there you have it. Those are my spoiler-free thoughts on Malignant. If you like Saw or love Saw, this might work for you. People are liking it, I see. I don't like Saw, but I think that's far better than this. So you can maybe take from that what you will. We're now going to move into some of the spoilery stuff. So please subscribe if you haven't, like the video if you enjoyed my commentary, and then maybe stop on back after you saw the movie and you can hear the rest of my thoughts. Okay, spoilers. It's been two days, so my brain has already basically erased most of this film from memory, but I'm going to do my best to recap. So we get the abusive husband thing. He slams Madison against a wall in their house in the middle of the night. She's got blood coming down. She doesn't think to go to the hospital, but we find out later there's a reason for that. Maybe subconsciously she can't because she's not actually in control of her own body, which would also I guess explain why she doesn't think to leave the house because she's being controlled by someone else. The tumor, the thing that couldn't be removed from her. The problem with this approach to filmmaking is the audiences are very frustrated when you see something like this. The common sense is so removed from the character, and there's not a lot of mystery at this point. So it just looks like an incompetent idiot staying in this house after her husband was horrifically murdered there. I should back up a little bit and talk about some of the red flags thrown early on. That opening scene where we're in the psychiatric ward or the hospital, whatever it is, the mental institution type of thing, we have the alarms going off. A lot of the doctors are dying and the main doctor says, it's time to cut out the cancer. And so this was the opening of the film. The way it was shot, the way it was visually displayed was not pleasing at all to me. I thought, oh no, this doesn't look good. I don't care for this style. And that kind of carried throughout the movie, which is very light on atmosphere. It was very disappointing. During the course of the killings, we don't know if this thing is supernatural, if it's part of Madison. Well, it's part of Madison. That's what I figured out very, very quickly on, especially when we, the whole line of cut out the cancer. She kept feeling the back of her head and not getting it checked out, which was a big indicator that, uh-oh, she's got a Voldemort situation going on. This is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 2.0, or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the Purists out there. I hear you. They went full bore Professor Quirrell in this film, yet somehow that was more disturbing in a kids movie. The prison scene's gonna be the moment that everyone points out, where Madison's in the cell with a bunch of ladies and, uh, she lets her freak flag fly, opens up the back of her head and just starts going John Wick on everyone in there, breaking bones, smashing faces. It's gory. It's delightful. It's very silly. And the whole time, the cops are nowhere to be found. Just the worst police force I've ever encountered. And I'm from Minnesota. You have this awful wig on the back with the face, and then you have Madison's face. Just so stupid. And the creatures jumping and killing people. You know, it's her twin brother. They're conjoined and they couldn't remove him from her, so they're sharing the same brain and he's taking over and she doesn't know what's going on during these situations. It could have been a cool idea. I just, it was just presented so piss poorly. I don't have a ton of spoiler stuff to talk about, I realize. Most of it was very predictable to me. I knew who her mom was right when she was captured and chained into that room. I knew the ending was her, you know, now making her brother see things that weren't there, so that was obvious. Without the interesting story, you're left with a really ugly looking movie. It left me bummed out. I was so pumped to watch this film, seeing nothing about it, but that cool poster with the blade, the red blade going down on the eye. I thought James Wan, he's back. Conjuring, baby. No. It was more saw. It was more saw. I'm about spent, so thank you for watching the spoilers section. If you did, leave a comment. Let me know if you saw the movie and what you thought. Again, like, subscribe, tell your friends, share the video, blah, blah, blah, and I'll see you again shortly. I guess the big question is which is better? Malignant or Maleficent? Because they sound similar. Maleficent is better. Maleficent is better. What the hell, James Wan? Why am I picking that? Since you're still here, maybe think about joining me on Patreon or right here on YouTube via the join button. They're just, it's a way for you to say, hey, Adam, I want to be part of your community. I want to help you grow your channel. Here's a dollar a month. Here's $5 a month. You just set it once and you walk away. You get access to the exclusive show, The Cringe, which I do every month. It's a ton of fun. It's only for patrons and YouTube join members. So maybe really think, maybe rack your brain or your buddy's brain on the back of your head and say, hey, Quirrell, let's do this. Let's help Adam out.