Almost Mercy (2015)

[Jigsaw]

While certainly not your conventional horror flick, Almost Mercy had a tone and presentation I deeply enjoyed, though I feel that to many horror fans, the movie would fall flat.

What did you think of this quirky horror flick?

[Shadow]

Almost Mercy, as near as I can tell, is a "love letter" to every modern day trope that social/mass media simply love to bring up at every conceivable turn. Uncaring parents or authority figures? Check. Prescription and recreational drug abuse? You better believe it. Disgusting church officials? In spades! Bullying and mass murder? Of course. And don't you worry, if it's a soapbox topic for someone- anyone, you'd better believe I probably just didn't cover it. But let's try our best to skip over all this for the time being (literally impossible), and try and get into the plot.

The story revolves around two childhood friends, Jackson and Emily. Emily is an oddball wimp of a girl who, surprise surprise, is often bullied by a bunch of poopy-heads. Enter Jackson- the new kid, even wimpier and oddball-ier than she is. He becomes the new primary target for the poopy-heads' ire. They become best buds after murdering an injured bird together.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Emily's mother is a pill-popping, plastic-surgery-having, depressed house wife to a husband that is basically never there. Her dad? You could write a completely new movie on the degeneracy in that dude's life. Jackson's dad is a useless, abusive, pill-popping wellfare queen, who expects Jackson to do pretty much everything. His mom only stays for the wellfare- this is literally what they narrate and basically all we know of her.

These cheery lives that Jackson and Emily live help them bond. They bond even further over their mutual hatred and disgust for pretty much everyone and everything in their small town.

We eventually find that Jackson is pretty much getting cornholed by the local priest. Because if you already have this much shit piled on top of your main characters before the first quarter mark into the movie, why not a few pounds more?

We fast forward years later, after more BS. Jackson finally snaps after Poopy-head Prime chucks an open bottle of piss at him, as soon as he walks out of the shower (that's the part that really pissed me off. hey-o). So Jackson, reasonably, bites Mr. Prime's thumb off and lays the smackdown on the cohorts Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

This is apparently illegal, but since the 5 o'clock shadowed obviously 20-something year old playing a teenager is, in fact, a teenager in this movie- he only has to become a pill popper, himself, in the psych ward; for a year or so. All the while Jackson is away, Emily decides it's time to drink, snort, and screw everything under the sun. Because why not. But it's okay, because after Jackson gets out, his PO teaches him all about how to take out his aggressions by killing things with guns. Once Jackson comes back he and Emily pull themselves out of their rut; at least for a time.

As it turns out, though, there is trouble in paradise. Jackson, despite how well he's been, has actually been planning a school shooting. Because this is what happens when people touch guns- they become deranged, anger-filled murder machines. So sayeth the arsenal.

Then the day finally comes. His day of vengeance has arrived: he drives to the school. His palms are sweaty. Knees weak; arms are heavy. There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

Then he chickens out, drops the gun, and gets caught by the police before he can even turn the ignition all the way. There is no escaping this time, 20-something year old.

Or is there?

You see, Kane Hod- Coach Elwood, taught Emily a valuable lesson a good while back. Jackson is a pussy. When she finally realizes this, she decides that she can do much better than he can, and begins to spree the shit out of pretty much every other named character in the movie. Admittedly, she did so in style.

To end off this modern day Romeo and Juliet, Emily then goes to the cops, kills them and frees Jackson. Jackson then pulls a Robert Fisher and decides to go out on a camping trip. Fin.

Now, if you haven't been able to tell by my beaming narrative of this piece, I do have a few problems with it. It isn't the acting- I think everyone does a fairly decent job for the most part, considering what they were given to work with. There are a few characters/scenes where the acting is amped up in the level of campiness- though I can't tell if that was intentional or not (considering how relatively serious the movie seems to want to take itself up until the last 20 minutes, I assume the latter for the large portion of the movie). I don't even necessarily have a problem with the premise of the movie itself, really.

The issue that I have is that they simply attempted to put far, far too many eggs into what really should have been a very small basket. The other issue I had with it was the fact that, really, nothing even close to horror happened in this movie. Hell, I couldn't even consider it a slasher up until the very last 20 minutes of the movie.

I suppose you might be able to consider it horror if you take the entire movie as a whole- sort of like the build up of what could be a school shooter. But Jackson failed. Spectacularly, in fact. And he wasn't even going to kill indiscriminately- he had a very specific hit list, down to the location. To top this off, we never really got to see a very good look into the "disturbed" mind of Jackson. These things essentially pulled the rug out from the entire movie. They then try to M. Night the sucker by bringing Emily into the mix, which admittedly makes the plot take a more interesting turn, but I personally would still would not call it horror.

Overall, I can't really say I enjoyed the movie a whole lot. It really did have potential, story-wise, but I feel that they were too ambitious. They tried to go too deep, and drowned because of it. K-I-S-S, man, K-I-S-S. You had the acting, you had the story, even the filming was pretty decent. However- with the way this movie ended it comes off, to me, as a cross between what the script writers envision is in the world of a mass shooter along with a tear and jizz-stained diary entry of Elliot Rodger.

Also, it's not a Glock, it's a Springfield XD and it doesn't have any on-off safety. You literally put a close up of the logo!

If we are doing a 10-star score, with 5 being dead average, I'd give it a 4. Maybe next time make a movie about post-slashing Emily, she was fun.

4/10

[Chucky]

Love the depth of the review. As per my comment on your Strangers: Prey at Night thread, you should add your review to the movie page (minus the play-by-play of events).

[Jigsaw]

It's clearly horror and Shadow's clearly wrong about everything. 

Shame you didn't care for the film. Now I know not to recommend quality films to you.