Velvet Buzzsaw: A painting that tries to say a lot but no one wants to look at (Rating: 5 art critics on 10)

When I watch a horror movie, I look for a few things. I want a bit of suspense, a gradient of laughs (could be just a few if it’s a more serious movie and a lot if it’s total B horror), and interesting death scenes. Jason X was big and dumb, but it made the most of its teenage kill fodder by making the deaths as cool and funny as possible. Falling onto a giant screw and spinning around and around on it? That’s cool! I like it! Hell, Final Destination is an entire 5-movie franchise based on intriguing ways to die. I still have an image of that gymnast suddenly falling awkwardly to her death etched in my brain. This is exactly where Velvet Buzzsaw goes wrong.

The film revolves around several competing art dealers as they backstab each other to market and sell art. All the main characters are the dealers (and a critic), one of whom discovers a batch of artwork in the apartment of a man who just died. Instead of sending the paintings to the junk bin, one of the art dealers, Josephina, snatches every piece of work and starts selling them on behalf of the company she works for. Naturally, this doesn’t bode well for anyone who has anything to do with the paintings, as a supernatural force starts to play with them.

The movie is fun for the first half, skewering art critics and dealers for being total douchebags. They strong-arm museums into showing their new collections, they critique others work poorly to get back at their ex-lovers, and they don’t respect anyone’s opinion except their own. It’s so bad that the artists are now working for the dealers and some of them are making poor artwork because of it. At a funeral, they even critique the casket one of their peers is buried in. The dialogue is fun on its own too, so pretentious that you can’t imagine any normal person speaking that way. Except for art critics, of course.

The trouble lies in what happens once the supernatural force comes for the corrupt critics and dealers (minor spoilers to follow). They keep getting knocked off, one by one, by otherworldly ghosts and apparitions, kind of in the spirit of the Twilight Zone or The Ring. Unfortunately, it’s just not enough. This is a movie that espouses vitriol against those who take artwork for granted. If you’re going to discuss good art, you best make sure your movie has some serious aesthetic value, like the paintings the critics are chiming in on. These death scenes…they’re just not enough. They make me want to critique the film in the same way Jake Gyllenhaal poopoos all over that casket. There is nothing inspiring to these death scenes, nothing glorious and breathtaking that would make me want to buy them, no matter how deadly they are. I get that the message of the film is that art belongs to the people, but if that’s the case, go to the people for the best, dumb, most absurd ways to kill a person and make it a thing of beauty. These death scenes need to be as gaudy as the tastes of the art critics to really make it count.

So, the movie works in one way, as a critique of the art industry. It doesn’t follow through entirely, and that’s a shame because I love me some good, hearty gore and destruction in my horror movies. The performances were all above average, the set pieces were there to be had, the script was well-written and intriguing. Just like a mediocre painting, though, it needs to be more inspired to make me buy it.

Escape Room: Made by escape room enthusiasts for escape room enthusiasts (Rating: 7 survivors on 10)

Escape Room is exactly what it says it is: a movie about escape rooms. There’s really not much more than that. It’s fun, sort of dumb, reminds me of Saw a bit, and makes for an hour and a half of people cleverly finding ways out of elaborate set pieces meant to kill them. You could probably do worse during January and February, when studios dump most of their weak-sauce films.

The film is about several seemingly random people who are sent boxes containing an invitation to the ultimate escape room. Once there, they must find clues within a certain time limit before their environment offs them. So, they go from room to room searching for clues, dangling from ledges, avoiding hypothermia, and finding key puzzle pieces that lets them get to the next room. There’s the awkward, shy college student, the cocky businessman, the down-on-his-luck guy who works packing boxes, a pretty, athletic woman, a random truck driver-looking guy, and a young guy who loves doing escape rooms (because of course he does).

All the characters play up to their stereotype throughout the movie, but not in any over-the-top or funny kind of way. The plot is thin…and I mean thinner than Tara Reid on drugs! (Hi-yoooo) It’s got some twists, but they’re not half as intricate as the escape rooms they designed for this thing. Overall, it’s really the most disappointing thing about the movie, because the escape rooms are fun enough, with plenty of suspense to keep you guessing when a character might get knocked off. Of course, like a Rube Goldberg machine, things happen that, in turn, set off other events within the room that cause chaos and destruction, torturing our heroes as we cheer for them to make it out alive. Each room is well-designed, shuffling from one type of atmosphere (outdoors in the cold) right into another (a billiards bar). It’s just that the writers focused all their attention on the rooms themselves and forgot to add the same kind of dynamic to the story, from the initial character introductions and foreshadowing to the dull conclusion.  

Look, you have two choices: either you want to see people escape from these rooms, risking life and limb, or you want to do an escape room yourself. Both are good options, and both will kill around two hours. Should you spend $20 and see Escape Room in theaters? Probably not. Is it worth renting when you have nothing else to watch? Yeah. Is it better for your brain to solve puzzles on your own instead? Of course! Just don’t expect too much out of either, because the prize at the end is rarely worth it—unless the escape room you finish gives you cash…cash or like LEGO sets or something, then it’s totally worth it.