M3GAN

Well, after a long heat spell, the cold is about to hit northwest Ohio. In the shows during the forecasts, I can only stare at the 10 day forecast, but sadly it's only going to be cold. I'm still bummed that I missed the crazy amount of snow Toledo got hit with it two years while I was in the Sunshine State. Oh well, kids remember to bundle up while trick-or-treating! Now, let's talk about...

M3GAN (2022)

The killer doll isn't a new thing in Hollywood. Obviously, the most famous of them is Chucky. But there's also Annabelle, the baddies in the Puppet Master series, Talky Tina from "The Twilight Zone" and several more. Point is, it's not an original idea,, so you need something to make it stand out and have the audience not roll their eyes at people getting overpowered by a five-pound doll. Chucky gets a pass because he's been around a long time, he's funny and Brad Dourif kills it in the role. So, how do you make your killer doll stand out and not require you to suspend your disbelief? In this case, you eschew the supernatural and go with technology. I'm also ignoring the Child's Play remake, so this is the first time that's ever been done in a movie!

The movie starts with a young girl Cady, and we get front row seats to how she loses her parents. After a devastating car crash, she's then sent off to live with her Aunt Gemma. Gemma works for a toy company, and she's working on something in secret without her boss's knowledge. The reason it's secret is the idea could change the game, but they're throwing a whole lot of money at it without company approval. Dealing with the pressure, she decides to rush M3GAN in front of her boss, who then REALLY rushes M3GAN into production despite none of them really understanding what she's capable of.

Gemma built M3GAN as a companion to Cady. She does everything you could want from a parent, not a friend. Gemma is so preoccupied with her job and being completely unprepared to raise a child that she doesn't see how close Cady and M3GAN are getting, nor how the doll is going beyond its parameters, acting a little too independently and getting increasingly protective of Cady to the point where she's straight up murdering people.

As far as horror movies go, it's not scary. But as far as horror baddies go, M3GAN is terrifying. For starters, that scene that plays in the trailers where she chases after the boy on all fours gets me every time. There's just something so wrong about seeing someone chasing after a person while running on all fours. Like, my brain can't comprehend it because a human shouldn't be running like that. It's so uncanny valley, that my lizard brain sees her running and it creeps me the hell out. Not only that, but her stares are so unsettling. Something weird or violent would happen, and someone would suggest that maybe M3GAN was behind it before the idea gets swatted away. Then the camera would show M3GAN staring at the people talking. I love the little mind game she's playing there. She's sitting there completely still, but she's staring right at them with no explanation as to how she got there. There's just enough there to make the characters worry, while questioning their sanity, because they're starting to warm up to the idea of a killer doll.

I watched the unrated version on Peacock, and from what I read, the biggest difference is the violence and "F Bombs", because there's no way my version was PG. This version has a lot more creative kills. One of the characters literally loses her face because M3GAN power washes it right off. It's one of those crazy deaths that you see, and at first you're curious where it's going, but when it gets there, all you can do is yell, "Oh shit!" It's pretty great.

While watching this movie and noticing the body count, I was struck by how few characters are in it. I'm not talking about the extras, because there are plenty of them. There are less than a handful of characters that go beyond the one thing we know about them. The only ones given room to breathe are Cady, Gemma and M3GAN. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it kind of feels a little like Friday the 13th V, where randoms got introduced just to get killed, but nowhere near as egregious as that one. Despite that, there's at least one character that the movie spends a tiny bit more time with, and despite being set up as a big asshole, I really liked her boss, David. He's such a big, enthuistatic jerk, but once he sees what Gemma has made, all he can see are dollar signs, and he jumps in a little too whole-heartedly. He doesn't care about any more testing, he wants it out there before anyone can scoop them. By the time Gemma realizes how dangerous M3GAN is, David has got so many balls rolling that this is going to happen, or many heads are going to roll. I liked him, I thought he was funny, and enjoyed how he'd switch from super asshole to super friendly when it suited him.

I enjoyed watching M3GAN and Cady's relationship. Little by little, they get so attached that neither can stand being away from the other. As M3GAN gets more violent in protecting Cady, Cady gets more violent and almost feral when M3GAN is taken away from her. You start to wonder who is feeding off of who, or maybe what is the better choice of words.

I also liked how everything slowly escalates until M3GAN just wants to murder everyone, and it's something she's good and creative at. The final fight is a big highlight too. The surprise callback to something earlier in the movie was awesome and made me smile. It was such a cool setup and the movie re-creating Hulk vs. Wolverine was a very cool moment. But because they wanted that fight to be more than a squash, they needed to make a change to the arithmetic; it was silly, but probably the only way to realistically take that thing out of the equation.

I know they made a sequel but from what I've read, in that one, M3GAN isn't so much a murderous doll gone out of control, but more of anti-hero and the movie is no longer horror and is more of a thriller. I liked M3GAN, she was a cool character, but the character loses their punch if she's not as dangerous to everyone like she was in the original. For that reason, I'm out. But, I'm not going to judge a movie by its sequel, because this was very entertaining and enjoyable.

8.5 Dr. Chainsaws!