Crazy Bitches Review

Movies that want to straddle genres (most do) must be careful to actually embrace their generic identities.  Jane Clark's Crazy Bitches lands dully in the dead zone between horror and comedy, never conjuring up any scares, and rarely eliciting any laughs.  Separately, the genres operate on the element of surprise; together, they work similarly, with an additional layer of surprise found at the intersection of thrills and humor.  Here, the disparate elements are kept apart, and handled with so little imagination or style, that they barely exist at all.

That isn't to say Crazy Bitches is without its charms.  The film is built on a fine concept.  A group of women (and their token gay friend) go to a remote cabin on a ranch (/kinda in the woods) for a relaxing bonding session.  The gay friend, BJ (Andy Gala) is there in part to document the haunted establishment, where years ago, a group of teenage girls were murdered in ways that reflected their youthful vanity.  Of course, he shares this story with the group, sending chills down their spines, and of course, the same thing starts to happen again, with the group being picked off one by one by "the Vanity killer."

The story is very much in line with the slasher tradition of impurity and "sin" being punished.  Think of any entry in the canon, and you can likely recall a busty girl getting stabbed moments after being penetrated for a very different purpose.  Here, the idea of punishment is played with some very clever (and even funny) kills, with the movie obviously telegraphing what features will be used to off each character.

Unfortunately, the characters don't particularly stand out.  The title is perhaps only half accurate, as this is a miserable group of women we're stuck with.  Through weirdly sudden flashbacks, we learn about all the misdeeds and betrayals within the friend group, most of which involve sleeping with each other's lovers.  They're almost all introduced in one heaping lump, and their personalities are so nasty that it's hard to differentiate them for a while, and even harder to care.  It's tough to even single out a "final girl (or guy)" to cheer for, because the more moral among the group are dull for their own reasons.  Innocent little Minnie (Liv McGreever) is notable because she's vegan; how wild!

It's a bummer that, even with its typical horror setting, Crazy Bitches fails so miserably to establish atmosphere.  Most of the kills happen in daylight, as does most of the other action.  Seeing shadowy figures looming in the middle of the afternoon doesn't have the same effect, especially when scenes leading up to kills are overly reliant on mesh-filtered POV shots that inspire no fear.  Even when looking through their eyes, we're kept at a distance from the killers.  Our only identifier is the suspicion that the Vanity Killer might be up to his old tricks, but that's barely anything to go on, especially since that backstory isn't fleshed out until the end of the movie in a grand old exposition dump.  Without any sort of identity or personality even on the killers' part, watching Crazy Bitches is a weirdly unengaging endeavor.  We watch people we don't know or care about kill other people we don't know or care about, and then it ends.

Most troubling of all is how pointless Crazy Bitches proves to be.  Throughout the film, I was waiting for the thematic reveal.  This is prime real estate to comment on the objectification of women on screen, to subvert the male gaze, to empower women, to play with genre.  Crazy Bitches doesn't really dip its toe into any of that.  There's a bit of a Mean Girls streak going through the film, but that basically reinforces the upsetting notion that these women had it coming, and deserve the punishment that is so creatively doled out.  They're punished for vanity, adultery, betrayal; are we supposed to cheer their deaths?  The film doesn't seem to really know, and it ends up feeling almost anti-feminist, which is especially troubling coming from a female writer-director.  I have to imagine that wasn't Clark's intent, but when a film is so shapeless, toothless, and pointless, we're left digging through the mush looking for an explanation.

Even though it exists in a dead zone between genres and doesn't offer much for viewers to hold onto, Crazy Bitches has moments of clarity and fun.  A mountaintop brawl actually made me laugh out loud, and the reveal surprised me.  There are enough motives among the group to cast suspicion on numerous campers, so it's at least a mildly engaging whodunnit, if nothing else.  The film offers nothing else, so I guess seek out Crazy Bitches if you want to guess your way through some miserable anticlimax, and for no other reason.