This review is late because I saw this nearly a week ago and I’m still struggling to articulate my hatred for this piece of shit. When I see something that pisses me off, I usually have half the review in my head by the time I get to my car. This left me with speechless rage. I didn’t think that there was any chance that The 15:17 to Paris wouldn’t be my worst movie of the year, but (spoiler alert for New Year’s) we have a new fucking champion. And if something tops this in the next six weeks, then I’m giving up on this as a hobby before I have a fucking aneurysm.
Suspiria is the worst horror remake ever made. And, yes, it’s a remake. The original Suspiria is an Italian horror film from 1977 and, though it may not be a familiar title for many, it’s considered a minor classic among horror fans. The original film is about an American dancer that is admitted to a dance school in Freiburg, Germany (yes, the city will be important to my later ranting), and it turns out that the school is run by a coven of witches. If you haven’t seen the original, then I highly recommend checking it out. It’s difficult to find these days and it has some Italian quirks to it that will be odd to modern audiences, but it’s a solid horror film with beautiful cinematography and one of the most irritatingly catchy soundtracks ever.
There were a couple of warning signs going into this film. First, this is 152 minutes long and the original is 98 minutes long. When remaking something, you should not find yourself with 55% more material than the original. It’s a good indicator that you’re being an asshat. Second, the writer of this film has said that he doesn’t like the original. Why the fuck would you write a remake of something that you don’t like? And why the fuck were you hired? Not since Ghostbusters has a remake been made with such disdain for fans of the original. At least the writers of the Ghostbusters remake liked the original. That’s how fucking bad this movie is. It made me nearly compliment the writers of the Ghostbusters remake.
This is the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual, pretentious hipster bullshit. This doesn’t so much feel like a remake of Suspiria as it does a condescending master’s thesis about Suspiria written by the most obnoxious twats to ever order a vegan scone. I don’t know what this movie is about and I’ve seen the original multiple times. I know the broad strokes of the plot because I’ve seen the original, but fuck me if I could tell you what’s happening in any particular scene. I saw this with a friend that hasn’t seen the original and I had to even explain the basic gist of it to him afterward. I won’t even touch on the performances because there are no characters here, only human vessels of thematic elements. This isn’t how you tell a fucking story. Theme and symbolism should arise organically as subtext of a narrative; they shouldn’t replace the fucking narrative. That’s just shitty filmmaking from people that think they are smarter than you and want you to know that they are smarter than you.
And why is this so agonizingly long? Well, we have some new elements here. The action is shifted to West Berlin so that we can have a subplot about a guy that was separated from his wife when the iron curtain fell. The film also repeatedly diverges to give us updates about the real-life hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by Palestinian terrorists. What does any of this have to do with the plot? Nothing. Fucking nothing. It’s an extra 54 minutes of material that adds nothing to the plot, feels completely out of place and only exists to shove feminist and political themes down our throats in the guise of remaking a classic horror movie. This would be like remaking Hellraiser but somehow incorporating the Zeebrugge disaster and footage of Reagan’s speech at the Berlin Wall.
As for positives, we get to see Dakota Johnson’s ass. Thus concludes the positives.
I absolutely despise this film. This movie nearly broke me of my habit of seeing and reviewing movies every week because I dreaded the idea of thinking about this long enough to write this review. Plenty of people asked me to review Bohemian Rhapsody but, no, I had to see this dumpster fire instead. I can deal with incompetent filmmaking, but I can’t take pretentious filmmaking and this thing damn near makes mother! look like a crowd pleaser in comparison. I implore you to just watch the original instead. It’s a solid, weird movie made by people that wanted to entertain you with a story rather than just beat you over the head with their inflated opinion of their own intelligence. And now I’m going to go back to pretending that this doesn’t exist.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspiria_(2018_film)#/media/File:Suspiria.png
