I couldn't stop thinking about the new Blumhouse thriller "Drop," but not for the reasons you might think. Meghann Fahy stars as Violet, a single mom and domestic abuse survivor who goes out on a first date with photographer Henry (Brendan Sklenar), who she's been messaging on a dating app. Their date keeps being interrupted by alerts on Violet's phone from a stranger - who is suddenly in Violet's house and threatening to harm her young son (Jacob Robinson) unless Violet does exactly what he says.
There is something about Meghann Fahy and Brendan Sklenar onscreen together that pings as very female-media-coded in a way that most movies in this genre don't. Specifically, "Drop" often displayed the aesthetics of an older breed of Lifetime made-for-TV movie. Fahy's not an actress I'm familiar with, but it didn't surprise me that she got her start in soaps, or that Sklenar recently appeared as the blandly hunky ex in last year's Blake Lively melodrama, "It Ends With Us." The target audience for "Drop" seems to be midwestern white moms. I specify white, because I have never seen a whiter post-1980s film set in Chicago. Seriously, the only minorities are the African-American bartender, a barely glimpsed onscreen therapy patient, and the gayest gay waiter I've seen in years. Was this on purpose? Was director Christopher Landon aware of what he was doing? The possibilities haunt me.
The fact that I was thinking about these sorts of details and not about the likelihood of this kind of situation ever happening to me tells you what I think about how effective "Drop" is as a thriller. Sadly, the title only incidentally refers to anybody plummeting from great heights. Instead, poor Violet is being harassed by a series of iPhone AirDrops that her blackmailer uses to communicate with her. "Drop" is a great looking movie that does a lot of fun things with the various text messages from the blackmailer, and features a beautiful restaurant in a skyscraper, Palate, as its primary location. However, the characters are paper thin, a lot of the plotting makes no sense, and the action beats are so tropey and silly that it completely took me out of the film. If the tone were campier, the dialogue zippier, and the romance less Instagrammable, this might have worked better. Well - I'm being meaner than I should. Fahy does a perfectly fine job, and original films are rare enough as it is. However, it's really hard to call "Drop" original, because it's so generic and borderline campy in all the wrong ways.
On to "Death of a Unicorn," a film with better actors and worse special effects. I wasn't expecting much out of this movie, since it came and went from theaters very quickly, and there was no real discussion of it among the movie nerds whatsoever. Like "Drop," this movie also feels like a genre flick making a play for female audiences, though in this case it's a creature feature instead of a thriller. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega star as lawyer Elliot Kintner and his college-aged daughter Ridley. They're headed for the remote home of the Leopolds - father Odell (Richard E. Grant), mother Belinda (Téa Leoni), and son Shepard (Will Poulter) - who head a pharma company, so Elliot can close a deal to do more lucrative work for them. And en route, Eliot hits a unicorn with the rental car.
After watching the trailer, I was expecting "Death of a Unicorn" to be very satirical, like "The Menu," or any of the other recent films about rich people being terrible. While "Death of a Unicorn" does belong in that category, the movie I kept finding myself making comparisons to was "Cocaine Bear." A significant chunk of this movie is a very broad horror-comedy where the characters are getting killed off left and right by big monsters, often in absurd and gruesome ways. The buildup to the carnage does have plenty to say about respecting nature and the privileged being terrible, but the writing is on the weak side, and it takes forever for things to escalate. Still you can't put Grant, Leoni, Poulter, and Anthony Carrigan (as a put-upon butler) in a movie together and not walk away with a few genuine laughs. Unfortunately, this leaves Selena Gomez to play it straight as our lead, and Paul Rudd is in the absolutely thankless role of '90s dad who cares about his job and financial security. They're good enough actors to pull through, but it's by the skin of their teeth.
First time writer/director Alex Scharfman has some great ideas, and I appreciate that he really goes for it with the CGI fantasy creatures in this film, despite clearly only having a limited budget. The most impressive thing about "Death of a Unicorn" may be its $15 million price tag. I feel the film got its act together by the finale well enough that I'd recommend it as a fun piece of silly horror comedy, especially for younger viewers. It's got glaring flaws, but it's good enough that I hope Scharfman gets more chances in the future to improve on this.
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