Well, hello there you blockchain loving sluts. I'm back here today to review a movie I watched recently, and, oh boy. I have no real idea where to start with this movie, to be honest. Malignant is horror director James Wan's latest project. If you're not familiar with his work, he's the one responsible for creating the Saw franchise, as well as the Insidious and The Conjuring franchises. A lot of people, if not most, went into this unsure of what to expect beyond expecting another high quality, sPoOkY horror movie. Instead, we got a highly divisive movie that may be the worst horror movie I have seen in the last few years, while also being the funniest, weirdest movie I've seen in awhile. I'm not sure what to make of this flick, because I have a lot of fucking questions about it. But, lets get into it, I guess.
(I'm going to be very up front, this review is going to delve into spoilers. I cannot talk about all of the weird shit in this movie without getting into spoilers. So, fair warning, you fuckers.) I have to wonder what James Wan intent was with making this film. I cannot tell if this was made solely with passion and it just came out being a weird mess. Or, if he just got the green light to do whatever he wanted after making Warner Bros so much money from Aquaman, so he made a shlocky 2021 version of an 80s b-horror movie that no studio in their right mind would ever allow otherwise. I personally wouldn't consider this movie a horror film, as at no point did I ever feel any tension or feel scared at all. But, it does a damn good job of being a hidden black comedy.
I'm pretty sure the rest of the review will just seem like I'm speaking in ancient tongues if I don't talk about the plot of the movie first, so lets get into that. (So, SPOILERS.) Sometime during the 1980's, a young girl gets pregnant and gives birth to a totally healthy, totally normal little girl...Who just also happens to have a tumorous, conjoined twin that looks like ET fucked Kuato from Total Recall. She gives her daughter up eventually to a doctor who specializes in performing children's surgeries to fix deformities. In the first half of the movie, it's kind of hinted at that there was horrible, spooky experiments happening, in part because the "hospital" is for some reason in a castle on a cliff that looks like Frankenstein's sex dungeon. But, as it turns out this is just a normal facility, with a normal doctor, who just happens to work in a medieval castle in the 90s in the US. Definitely not haunted, and definitely not where many, many blood orgies happened.
So, they perform the surgery but because they share the same brain, they can only cut out as much as they can. And, then sloppily shove the remaining parts into the back of her skull. You know, as any veteran surgeon would do. And, as we're told they have a psychic connection which allows him to control her brain and take over while she hallucinates and thinks she's dreaming. This revelation is what we figure out into the third act, where everything gets actually ridiculous and also extra hilarious. The whole rest of the movie is just a build up for the third act, and it does work in service of that. Had they cut out the introduction of the movie where it shows a glimpse of the dumb insanity waiting for us, I think it would have worked a lot better to surprise people. There's some stuff that isn't explained in the movie, such as why the parasitic twin has supernatural powers over electricity. Other than being there for convenience sake so he can communicate, I don't really know why that's a part of the movie. In fact, I don't even know why I'm analyzing anything about this movie. Why am I here? What's happening?
The tone of the movie is such a mixed bag, it's hard to really describe it. There's parts of the movie that remind me of spaghetti slasher movies, while also other parts that remind me of Sam Raimi stuff like Drag me to hell or Evil Dead II. But, then there's also elements of this movie that feel like I'm watching a Troma era movie, which is fucking weird in and of itself. Add on James Wan being a great technical film maker with this movie being shot really well, and what do you get? Well, I don't fucking know to be honest. I don't think anyone does, maybe not even James Wan at this point. If this was supposed to be a throwback movie paying reverence to 80's shlock horror, I don't think he was the right person to do so. Because, everything he does is very modern in style and tone. But, then again, maybe this was just a big troll from James Wan himself. Who fucking knows.
Another thing with the movie is that it almost borderlines on being a parody of a horror movie pretty much the entire time, and I can't tell if it's on purpose or not at all. James Wan knows how to direct scenes and actors, he's proven that many times in the past. This film has so many hilariously, dumb lines written in it and they're all said straight faced and taken so seriously that you just end up laughing. The acting is also quite bad in this movie, especially in the last third where there's a ton of overacting happening. It's so hard to gauge this movie on any kind of scale. If James Wan's intention was to fuck with the audiences and make it more of a prank for the viewers, then I would say he succeeded pretty damn well in what he did. Since, the first half of the movie seems like a supernatural thriller/horror, then all of a sudden becomes nonsensical as fuck once we get to the jail cell scene. (Seriously, the movie becomes a gory assassin's creed style action flick for a bit. I can't say it enough, this movie is fucking bizarre.) But, if this was a serious attempt at anything then I feel like someone was micro dosing the entire cast with shrooms while filming.
One more thing I picked up on that was really weird were the set pieces in the movie. There's definitely an Italian slasher style in the first half of the movie. The lighting in a lot of the scenes is very giallo like, and the style of filming is definitely reminiscent of those type of films. A big example of that is the exaggerated views you get through the film. The main characters house for example looks totally normal sized on the outside shots. But, once you're inside the house the layout makes no sense at all because it's like a mansion all of a sudden. The ceilings look to be 40 feet tall, while it's only a second story house. There are so many huge rooms in the house, it literally looks like a 15 million dollar mansion. It's unintentionally funny to me. The police station is another example, where you'll never see any police station that looks like this one does, especially with the humungous ceiling and style that looks like an ancient mega church or something.
A set piece that I wish they'd done more with though was the Seattle underground. It doesn't really make 100 percent sense either (Does anything in this movie though?), but it did look pretty fucking cool and interesting. With all the abandoned late 1800's style equipment and buildings covered in fog (There's actually a shit ton of fog in this movie, it's another thing that eventually you kind of smirk at because it's so goofily overdone) and darkness, it comes off very Silent Hill-esque. Which is probably why it peaks my interest so much. But, it was a cool concept in the movie that they only played around with for a few minutes. The only other movie that I could compare it to which has played with something similar was Mimic by Guillermo Del Toro, but that wasn't nearly as cool as it looked here.
This review has probably seemed like rambling nonsense, much like the movie. But, it's really hard to write about this movie and keep it to a short format. I would compare watching this movie to watching The Room combined with The Bye Bye Man, or Wish Upon. It's so fucking goofy and dumb but also just so entertaining to watch. This is definitely a movie where it's so bad and dumb that it's good, so I can't really compliment a lot about it. There's a lot of cool cinematography happening in this movie, and I enjoyed the goofy action scenes that were probably a better assassins creed movie than the assassins creed movie. I think it was a definitely a ballsy move on James Wan's part because no one will be able to take his attempts at horror movies as seriously as before. But, maybe that was intentional.
Overall, I would definitely recommend the movie because there's many different ways you can take it while watching it. And, yet, you'll probably still arrive to the same conclusion because it's so fucking silly and stupid. It might be an homage to shitty 80's horror movies, or it might be James Wan taking the piss. Either way, I liked it enough where I'll show it to people in the future to see what kind of reaction they'll have to this messy trashfire of a movie. So, go watch it if you haven't seen it already.
Until next time, doods! Later!