Gutsycurene
Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.
Thomas Clement (Mr. OpEd)
Oren Uziel has confused F-bombs for dialog. Admittedly, some of the actors may have been allowed to ad-lib profanity here and there, but it all quickly added up to the point where that's all we heard. No one I know talks like this and I live in Los Angeles!Loved the premise. Usually like zombie/vampire/alien movies, but this was tooooo much to put up with. Turned it off after 15 minutes.
George Taylor
I can see the pitch for this. Say lets have a town where zombies, vampires and humans live together. Everything is cool, with the usual suburban angst, kid who's not a jock, unrequited love, pothead girl, AND GET THIS, the whole town exists to make horrible riblet sandwiches! And then? And then ALIENS COME! Yeah, sounds like a winner, right? Wrong. It's silly, contrived and dull. The biggest names have only a little screen time (Blink and you'll miss Patton Oswalt). I blame Shaun of the Dead for movies like this. It's really difficult to make a convincing horror/comedy. What makes Shaun of the Dead so great is that it's a horror movie, following all the conventions of such films, and it's funny at the same time. Freaks of Nature is simply silly and never gets above that bar. There is one reveal at the end (which anyone watching will guess 1/3rd of the way through the movie) that is the one somewhat surprising thing. Other than that, this is just a dull, silly movie. I expect it'll be showing up endlessly on the SyFy channel.
Gregory Mucci
The creatures of the night, like human beings, just can't seem to get along. It has been a continuous struggle since Roy William Neil's 1943 classic, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the first in an ongoing series of Universal Monster films that introduced the abominations to each other, generally to no avail. Despite being outcasts, maligned to the farthest reaches of humanity, and forced to hide amongst the shadows, these creatures rarely ever saw eye to eye. Then again, they never were meant to. Constructed to represent our darkest fears, the earliest of on-screen monsters resembled the internal struggle mankind faced on a daily basis. It's these fears and distresses that often pit us against each other, a clash of humanity that sees the worst exuding from our every pore. From Frankenstein's misunderstood monster, Larry Talbot's (Wolf Man) fear of what he'll become in life, all the way to Dracula's impenetrable carnal craving that literally leaves a path of corpses in his wake, we have come to embrace our favorite monsters symbolic representations of ourselves. Fast forward to present day, decades after Romero has raised the living to bring us one of the most popular embodiments in horror; the zombie, a symbol of consumerism and our worries of a post-mortem existence. A world that exists years after Anne Rice has given the literary world a resurgence of faith in the vampire mythos with 1976's Interview with a Vampire; an 18th century world where the immortal ones are represented as aristocratic lords, feasting off the lowest common denominator. Vampires have become a class placeholder, representing the privileged and wealthy, with such films as Vampire Academy and We Are the Night. Sure, there are vampires who rest below this unearthed social standing (The Lost Boys, Near Dark), but it's what they represent that raises them into the upper echelon; eternal life, sexual appeal, and desirable strength.Enter Freaks of Nature, a slice of genre pie that relishes the retro vibe of 1950's Americana creature features, all the while taking cues from the class systems of our favorite horror icons. There are the vampires at the top of the food chain, who treat blood sucking as an elevated form of sexual intercourse, walking the halls of Dillford High School with a heightened sense of superiority. Buried at the bottom are zombies, who are portrayed as mindless brain consumers, residing in dilapidated homes with neck braces resembling parolee anklets, their appetite to consume controlled. They are rationed brains in sardine-like cans, and when they are forced to live on without their food, they slowly regain some of their humanity back. It's a brilliant little commentary on the state of America's poverty level; our homeless left to fend for themselves when worst comes to worst. Stuck in the middle are the humans, who coexist in a perpetual state of fear against those more powerful (vampires) than them, and unenvious of those unable to afford the luxuries of life (zombies).Coexisting together for reasons unknown (it's bound to happen, right?), life in Dillford (Home of the Riblet!) lurches forward despite continuing bigotry between the humans and the vampires, while the zombies simply exists as mere pests rather than problems. There's dweeby jock Dag (Nicholas Braun), who despite having caring parents (let alone ones that are alive, played by Joan Cusack and Bob Odenkirk), a fast arm on the baseball diamond, and a pot smoking flirt of a neighbor (Vanessa Hudgens), always finds his position in life less than desirable. Playing counterpoint to Dag's unconfidently cool exterior is Ned (Josh Fadem), who roams the halls between vampiric scorn and ridicule from long-time and long-toothed teacher Mr. Keller, and centuries old yet still high school senior Milan (Ed Westwick), who manipulatively preys on the fair skinned Petra (Mackenzie Davis). All three of our presumably dejected teens, be it love, family, or the absence of both, find themselves at the center of an alien invasion that pits each class system against each other, a bloodbath of monumental proportions commencing....
