#javier botet

Gerard Butler / Javier Botet / Luke Evans

These hot boys are some hot takes on our beloved vampire! What if he were a creepy bat creature full time? What if he became monstrous for love? What if he were Gerard Butler in the year 2000?

Choose one of these spin-off boys to represent the Count!

This mediocre haunted house film was titled in its original Spanish Voces. A direct, literal English translation of "Voices" or "The Voices" would have worked just fine, but somewhere in the marketing chain that imported it to the US, someone swapped the Spanish tagline for the movie ("No las escuches"; literally "don't listen to them") in for the title. Was this a careful, rational decision designed to appeal to the American market? Or did someone misread the box art and blithely plow on ahead without checking to see if they'd made a mistake?

This is a movie that couldn't decide whether it wanted to have an old-school grindhouse gore feel or if it wanted to wallow in the deep, human, adult emotions of a Mike Flanagan movie, so it decided to try for both. For every moment the camera lingers over a grisly scene of a woman's face impaled by a tree branch, there is a corresponding amount of time exploring the facial contours of a grieving father who just lost his only son. The result is muddled, and I'm pretty sure the director knew it wasn't working, which explains why the film doubles down again and again on jump scares as it lurches toward its end. The final act is almost entirely composed of ghosts popping out of the shadows and screaming at the characters, which doesn't make it scarier, but does make it a very accurate representation of a Jaycees haunted house.

After the underwhelming experience of Always Watching, I moved on to the other Slenderman movie that I knew of, this one right here with Javier Botet as Slendy. I didn't realize it until I went to look it up that there are multiple "other Slenderman movies", including The Slender Man, Slender Man: Origins and TWO different films entitled Slender that were released in the same year. I hope Victor Surge is collecting some fat royalties from this character he dashed off for an online photoshop contest. I have now watched two Slenderman movies--the one made by a group that basically invented most of the lore around the character; and the one made by an actual studio with actual money behind it--and here's my conclusion: Slenderman just isn't that scary in a movie.

Slender Man is a pretty standard PG-13 horror movie. A group of teenagers (played by a group of 24-year-olds) stumbles on to some evil force that wants to take them, but not in a way that could risk getting an R rating. You could cut and paste whatever puritanical fear-mongering happens to be going on at the moment into this formula and arrive at pretty much the same movie. You could drop in a Ouija board, a Dungeons & Dragons manual, a heavy metal song being played backwards, or a new drug (Huey Lewis-approved or otherwise), and the results would be the same: these happy, normal "teens" suddenly have their lives destroyed by an evil abomination that must first be invited in and which you must avoid at all costs. It's just that now the evil thing that overly anxious parents can gin up unfounded fears about was ripped from the internet. This movie might as well have been about the damnably stupid "Momo Challenge" hoax that went around a few years ago.