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.
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