Rating: **
Starring: Ronen Rubinstein, Mia Serafino, Crispin Glover
From the late 1990s to the 2010s, a total of 45 young men were found dead in bodies of water across several Midwestern American states and it is theorized that these men were not accidental drownings, but were in fact victims of a possible serial slaying. Dubbed as the "Smiley Face Murders" after police discovered smiley face graffities near locations where the bodies were found in at least a dozen of the cases, the idea stems from the fact that the supposed victims collectively appear to resemble a serial killer victim profile, all popular, athletic, and successful students, mostly white and were leaving parties or bars where they had been drinking. This theory, however, is often met with skepticisms by responding investigators and experts due to little to no evidence of actual serial killing activity, nor did it have enough strong support linking the tragic deaths altogether.
What this hunch lacks in proof, it makes up for being morbidly fascinating, thus becoming the inspiration behind Smiley Face Killers (2020), a psychological slasher penned by screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, who also wrote the controversial splatter novel American Psycho.
The plot follows one university student and college football star named Jake who decided to stop seeing his therapist and disregard his psychiatric meds in favor of living a more carefree life of parties and recreational drugs. This, to no one's real surprise, leads to him acting more depressed and paranoid, concerning his girlfriend and friends, even more so when he's starting to suspect his girl is cheating on him with her ex, as well as believing that he's being stalked. Truth be told, though, he is indeed being stalked and a figure in a hood is doing whatever they can to freak Jake out like sending weirdly cryptic text messages, messing up his electronics, leaving bath tubs and faucets running until they're filled with water, and too leaving a map littered with smiley face markings.
It does all this for a good hour and this is where Smiley Face Killers (2020) falters; the story around these parts is basically one long wait to Jake's eventual encounter with the titular killers and it passes the time toying around the idea that Jake may or may not be imagining the worries eating him. This could've been an intriguing plot to follow given that the movie didn't opened with a small taste of what our killers are up to and what they're capable of doing, thus very well killing off whatever mystery and sense of dread this movie is going for and instead acting more like an avoidable teen drama, a terrible direction to take when the leading character leans heavily on the unnecessarily and unsympathetically dumb side. We do get one decent kill scene in the midst of this, but it is around the last fifteen minutes when, thankfully, the movie remembers that it's a horror thriller and things go crazy the right way.
After losing it at a party where he blames his girlfriend's ex of all the insane shit he'd gone through for the past few days, Jake gets abducted by a trio of miscreants operating in a white van decorated in the inside with occult symbols and rituals. They're the kind of last minute craziness I can warmly welcome after a long dull stroll and they didn't disappoint with their bizarre practice of draining "pure" blood out of their victims and their decent run of gory killings in which they massacre everyone attending a gas station after Jake gets a streaky chance to escape there. For some, though, this is understandably a little too late to salvage what's very much a dying story dulled down by the wasted minutes focusing on the misadventures of a very glum boy.
Smiley Face Killers (2020) could have benefited more if it took a different angle other than a teen slasher with a psychological twist, or at the least went with a better story than this. I will give it credit for making the last act as insanely fun as they can with the short remaining time, but I cannot deny the film for being a really tedious test of patience for a slow burner. Not much will be lost if you skip this one.
Bodycount:
1 male abducted, corpse later found washed ashore
1 male abducted, corpse later found washed ashore
1 male brained to death with a hammer
1 male shot on the head
1 female hacked on the face with a hatchet
1 male shot to death
1 female repeatedly hacked on the gut with a hatchet
1 male shot on the head
1 male knifed through the neck
Total: 9
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