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Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed watching this movie, and I was happy to see it in a theater that was packed with other people who were enjoying its wackiness. But there seems to be a lot of hype surrounding how excellent it supposedly is, and I don't expect that its reputation as an "excellent" movie is going to last very long. It's entertaining, for sure, but ultimately it's far less penetrating, scary, and meaningful than writer-director Zach Cregger's previous film BARBARIAN, which I think will have the greater reputation ten years from now.

WEAPONS is like so much mid-rate schlock that was churned out in the late 1990s. It would've starred Juliette Lewis and maybe Michael Douglas. Instead of jumping around in a nonlinear chronology with multiple point-of-view characters, it would have stuck closely to one perspective and one continuous storyline. It would've done this because it *should* have done this, because someone in the studio should have had the guts to tell Cregger that there's absolutely no reason why his story should be emulating Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA, because it actually spoils the momentum and adds nothing in the way of depth to fracture this particular plot into puzzle pieces.

This 1990s version would have still had all the same characters, but they would have been rightly positioned as mere supporting players--red herrings, moments of tangential interest, detours that provide the way to other clues--rather than masquerading as protagonists who deserve their own chapter titles. The only nonlinearity in the structure might have been some flashbacks in the big reveal of the final act.

And, perhaps most tellingly, this 1990s version--which maybe would've starred Ashley Judd instead of Juliette Lewis--wouldn't have been titled WEAPONS. It would have had a more straightforward title--something like WHERE THE CHILDREN PLAY. It wouldn't have had such a cryptic and seemingly symbolic title like "Weapons" because it wouldn't have been pretending to be anything other than a mystery about missing children. And by not pretending, it would have been a more honest and sincere movie, but also a more blatantly superficial one. It would've done pretty well at the box office, would've made some good rounds on VHS and HBO six months later, and would've disappeared into obscurity six months after that.

What's my point? My point is that the twenty-first century has been an era of "allegorical horror"--of "elevated horror," if you will. SINNERS, THE WOMAN IN THE YARD, TOGETHER: these are all recent horror movies that are much more about their metaphors than they are about the supernatural forces supposedly at play. Allegorical horror has become so widespread that I think some people wrongly expect that every horror movie should now have some meaningfully metaphorical dimension. The TERRIFIER films, the most recent FINAL DESTINATION, NOSFERATU: all good examples of recent movies that are first-and-foremost good, classic horror movies that don't bother or pretend to have some double meaning about the ills of modern society. I'm not drawing a binary here; I like allegorical horror and I like classical horror equally well whenever the movies are well made, and I'm not saying that one style is better than the other or that certain movies need to be one style rather than the other.

But here's the thing: Weapons is ultimately just classical horror. It has a very simple, supernatural plot, which is fully explored in the final 45 minutes or so of the movie. That plot has meaningful echoes in reality, of course, but it can also stand alone as just a scary story. Yet Cregger can't just leave it at that. He has to give us all these tantalizing, overlapping, irreducible details of symbolic potentiality. Why's it called "weapons"? What--or who--are the weapons? Is this about AR-15s? Is it about drug addiction? Systemic police brutality? The incompetence of bureaucracy? The bystander effect? Internet sleuthing culture and conspiracy theories? How grief can make us absentminded? How some corners of the Internet are like cults? Witch hunts? The dangers of "boundary crossing"? The dangers of NOT "boundary crossing"? Bullying? Child abuse?

The answer is that it's about all of these things, and in being about all of these things, it's ultimately about none of these things because it just doesn't have the intelligence to treat any of these topics with the depth that they deserve. The only topic it really explores in any depth? Voodoo zombie witchcraft rituals. It's not allegorical horror! It just wants us to believe that it is--not because it's a satire of the genre or because it's saying something insightful about such allegory but because in its heart I think it really wants to be "elevated horror."

But look, there's a reason why the screenplay I wrote when I was 14 years old also took the nonlinear ensemble structures of MAGNOLIA, PULP FICTION, and SHORT CUTS as its primary inspiration. And that reason wasn't because ninth-grade me was a genius storyteller like P. T. Anderson, Tarantino, or Robert Altman. No, the reason was that it's *easier* to write that way, not harder. If you can't get all the necessary plot details communicated through one perspective, then just throw in another perspective. If you can't develop anything deep and nuanced for one character, then just add another character. If you really stop to think about the characters in WEAPONS, then the only one who really has any depth, who actually does anything meaningful is little Alex (Cary Christopher). All the rest of them are rather static and superficial with some arbitrary details thrown into the blender. What do we really learn about the principal Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong) from being inside his perspective, other than that he has a sweet tooth?

Like I said, WEAPONS was very fun to watch. But it's really just one big vessel for delivering its grotesque and bonkers climax. And once the shock of that climax has worn off, there's really nothing more to attend to in this movie. I highly doubt I'd ever be interested in watching this movie again, for all the suspense would be gone and I doubt there'd be any newly discovered substance to take its place. I hope Cregger's next movie is better.

Roger Ebert used to talk about "clangs," which are improbable moments in a movie that jar the viewer from their suspension of disbelief and remind them that what they're watching is a lie. Clangs are subjective, and for me, a clang is only really jarring if it undermines some important aspect of the film. TOGETHER is an allegorical body horror film about relationship codependency that shows a lot of promise but unfortunately fails to truly deliver because of just how many clangs occur throughout some parts where it counts.

I'll list some of these clangs.

Tim and Millie are a couple in their late 30s who have what appears to be a pretty good life living in the city (Seattle perhaps?). Their life is so socially rich that they can throw a party for a large number of their close friends to toast their own going away with heartfelt speeches. They don't appear to want for money. There appear to be zero "push" factors that are forcing them to leave the city for some place new.

Instead, there's just a single pull factor: Millie has accepted a job as a ninth grade English teacher in rural Washington State. We can assume that this would be a pay cut, if only because she would have probably accrued 15 to 20 years of salary and benefit increases working as a teacher in the city. Her sole reason for ditching one job--and closeness to a huge network of friends, her family, her boyfriend's livelihood and everything he cares about, etc.--is because something about the job posting has suggested to her that the kids in this town will be "passionate" about learning whereas that hasn't been possible elsewhere. Right.

Is it impossible that someone would make such a decision? No, of course not. But the movie gives us all sorts of reasons for why this move will be costly, gives us almost nothing to suggest that the move is really worthwhile, and doesn't even interrogate that tension. What could have been a very quick fix in a small revision to the screenplay--perhaps she's an adjunct professor who's been offered a tenure-track position at a small university town in the middle of nowhere, which would have obvious large advantages for her--is instead left as a nagging clang of a poorly written detail.

Next, there's Tim's aspiration to be a professional musician. At one point in the movie, Millie and her best friend insult him for being a 35-year-old man who still dreams of being a rock star. This is presented as a sad little fact of his existence, but this fact is in direct contradiction to some of the exposition presented at the beginning of the film: he was recently signed to a record label, and Millie's brother is indeed a rising rock star who is signed to a label, going on a national tour, and offering to employ Tim as a musician. It's one thing if Tim has nothing whatsoever to show for his ambitious rock star dream. But Millie's attitude seems to suggest that she has forgotten altogether that her own little brother is indeed a rising rock star. Tim's very real chance of success as a professional working musician is completely dismissed by a high school English teacher who's just quit her own job to fulfill the dream of there being "passionate students" elsewhere.

I was going to keep going--like how even the timeline when she starts her new teaching job (late into the school year?) doesn't make much sense--but I'll actually stop here.

You may say that these are minor problems. After all, I already suggested a quick edit that would fix the problem necessitating their move. Some other quick fixes--like cutting out the brother character--could fix that other problem, too. But for me those little clangs matter because this isn't just a supernatural thriller about weird things in the water. Rather, this is presented as being a meaningful story about a relationship, and specifically a relationship in which two people are making decisions and sacrifices in order to share a life together. If this were just a story about weird things in the water, then the plot contrivances that get them to drink that water don't really matter. But from beginning to end, this film presents itself as a story in which the weird water is actually secondary and that what is primary is their recognizable reality as a high school teacher and an aspiring musician who've been in a stale, sexless relationship for ten years. And so it's important that we believe that reality. And it's not good when basic facts about their material existence come across as poorly thought out plot holes.

So this movie fails at fully delivering on the allegorical aspects because the reality it's meaningfully commenting on doesn't seem to have much foothold in reality.

That said, there is a lot that's enjoyable in this film. The body horror is effectively grotesque, there's a good amount of humor, and the lore that sustains the premise--while a little silly--is pretty clever. When Franco and Brie are in the thick of it, particularly in the second half of the movie, it becomes a lot easier to forget about the weaknesses of the screenplay and instead appreciate the chemistry brought by their real-life off-screen marriage.

Overall, I think writer-director Michael Shanks has a good bit of talent and has made a memorable movie. I just wish he'd given the screenplay another pass before committing it to film.

This movie is quite the oddity. On the one hand, the production values are nearly nonexistent, the dialogue is unnatural, the structure of the plot is amateurish, and the whole thing is founded on an immensely silly premise. On the other hand, it's... somehow... transfixing?

Jimmy Lydon plays Paul Cartwright, a teenage college kid who was born 102 years ago. He is--very, very loosely--a version of Hamlet, sad over the recent death of his powerful father and suspicious of his mother's new lover, who may indeed be his father's murderer if only he can get to the bottom of it. Unlike most performances of "the melancholy Dane," however, Cartwright is perpetually upbeat--cheerful, active, scheming, perhaps even flirtatious. He seems to be giving off a sexually charged charm in his interactions with literally everyone, be that his girlfriend, his best friend, his mom (especially his mom!), his elderly butler, or the random middle-aged bachelor nicknamed "Doc" with whom he has sleepovers. Lydon's performance could be called objectively awful since there's no reason why his telling his butler that he's going to take a shower should be played by the both of them as though it's a sexual innuendo, yet it's also rather mesmerizing to watch a detective move with such confidence and good humor through his dangerous investigation.

Most of the performances are intriguing in this way. George H. Reed plays the butler Benjamin as a mere racial stereotype in his first scene but later becomes quite convincing as the man who's seen everything but won't say anything. Warren William as the mother's paramour, Brett Curtis, does an excellent job of straddling the is-he-isn't-he line between perfectly sympathetic man falling in love and thoroughly sociopathic man pretending to fall in love, and Sally Eilers as the mother-slash-fiancee is equally convincing as someone who wants to honor her son's grief while also overcoming her own widowed loneliness.

But ultimately the screenplay does the film a great disservice. Rather than hewing closely to Paul's perspective as he investigates his would-be stepfather's genuine self, the filmmakers decide to give us Brett Curtis's perspective as well, completely ruining any sense of mystery or ambiguity. This happens very early on--much earlier than Claudius's prayerful confession in Hamlet, even--and it gives the viewer too many cards to play with, serving only to undermine the suspense. If they had held the reveal a little longer, I imagine this film would've been much stronger.

Of course, it could have never been a masterpiece; there's simply too much silliness and easy coincidence in the serial killer plot and the prophetic dream premise for it to be too meaningful. But for a production that could have--and should have--been much worse, it somehow does manage to be a memorable and entrancing little movie.