Julien Neaves, Editor
Plot: When a group of friends having a “hurricane party” at mansion start playing murder-in-the-dark mystery game “Bodies Bodies Bodies” things get very real and very deadly when an actual body turns up.
Review: I felt like I wasted the 94 minutes I spent watching Bodies Bodies Bodies, so I’m not going to waste your time with a long review. This 2022 black comedy horror film from Dutch director Halina Reijn is not funny, not scary, and not entertaining. The strength of these small-cast-in-a-single-location set-ups is in the characters, but here I found them either uninteresting, irritating or annoying, and this includes the leads Bee (Maria Bakalova), a working-class young woman from Eastern Europe, and her wealthy girlfriend Sophie (Amandla Stenberg). If they were meant to be the heart of the story, then they needed a defibrillator. In terms of recognisable actors, there’s Lee Pace (the Hobbit Trilogy, Guardians of the Galaxy) who’s okay as quirky older guest Greg, and SNL’s Pete Davidson, who is in full douche mode as David, the character whose family owns the mansion. I actually wish the characters were more unlikeable, or at least more over the top, as I possibly would have enjoyed seeing them bite the big one. As it was, I just didn’t care one way or the other.
I went into the film knowing it was a horror but not knowing it was a horror comedy, and only found that out when looking it up after. I presume they were trying to poke fun at millennials and spoiled rich kid culture, but I found nothing to laugh at here. The deaths are also very pedestrian. At least give me some gore, people. Something to keep the eyelids open. And the end twist would have been more effective if what came before was the least bit interesting. I was bored from start to finish and was just glad it was over.
Bodies Bodies Bodies could have been a clever horror comedy with a message in the vein of Tucker and Dale vs Evil. But what we got instead was a cool idea that was poorly executed.
Score: 4 out of 10
So have you seen Bodies Bodies Bodies? What did you think of it? And you can check out more cautionary horror reviews below:
Julien “Editor Jules” Neaves is a TARDIS-flying, Force-using Trekkie whose bedroom stories were by Freddy Krueger, learned to be a superhero from Marvel, but dreams of being Batman. I love promoting Caribbean film (Cariwood), creating board games and I am an aspiring author. I say things like “12 flavours of awesome sauce”. Read more.