Metacritic reviews

It’s a love letter to the genre without ever aping or mimicking it. With an incredible supporting cast and two engaging leads, it’s an out and out blast that finds Landon inching closer and closer to slasher masters like Craven and Carpenter.

Freaky is a bloody good time. It’s smart, sharp and funny with some tasty kills and headline casting that is to die for.

Is the big draw still watching Vaughn act like a teenage girl? You bet. But Freaky‘s success lies in its ability to create around that central performance and not simply rely upon its absurdity.

Freaky has enough snappy fun to keep it ticking along to the inevitable “shock” ending, forcing together two delightful powerhouses in a battle royale that seems primed to kickstart another new franchise for Landon.

This is a fast-paced, likable, and silly romp arriving at a time where a horror movie’s memorability tends to correlate with its evocative doominess. Even when Freaky doesn’t live up to its full potential, there’s still something oddly satisfying about unmasking a slasher movie to reveal the ’80s comedy lurking underneath.

Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

The unspoken joke of the title is that this movie really wants to be called “Freaky Friday the 13th,” which is not a bad starting point, but the line dividing gory violence and farcical hilarity — which Landon has skillfully walked in the past — gets too blurry for the movie’s own good.

Freaky has a lighthearted tone and a bouncy energy that keeps it watchable, even though writer-director Christopher Landon and his co-writer, Michael Kennedy, don’t do as much as they should have with a killer idea.

Although Landon and co-screenwriter Michael Kennedy have latched onto a winning concept, pairing the body-swap conceit with serial killer thrills, they’ve freighted the film with so many trite life-lesson moments that the fun gradually drains from the narrative, like blood from a murder victim.

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.