a review of 夺命惊吓

Let's get this out of the way right now: This movie is neither a liberal-baiting reactionary screed nor a send-up of right-wing nationalism. In fact, it's more than a little bit tone-deaf (or perhaps simply dated by its Clinton-era politics) and ultimately incoherent as a piece of political satire. That's disappointing but not a deal breaker. My issue with the film was that it just felt kind of messy and not very well thought out as a horror movie. It felt like a very loose first draft of a much better and tighter movie, with stray plot lines going nowhere and at least three or four extra characters that didn't do much of anything. Uncle Sam never quite becomes an interesting villain, because we find out that his supposed patriotic motivations are purely superficial -- it turns out that he's always been a psychopath and everyone in the movie knows it. There was one kind of interesting choice from a modern standpoint, and that was making the main kid character so deeply unlikable and sociopathic, literally from the very beginning of the movie. It doesn't seem like he's under any kind of spell, but rather that he's been indoctrinated since birth with a harsh, authoritarian worldview. This movie came out three years before Columbine) but the portrayal does seem a bit prescient of our current moment of school shooters and the people who enable them.