Movie Info
Movie Name: Snatchers
Studio: MAKE GOOD Content
Genre(s): Horror/Comedy
Release Date(s): March 12, 2019 (South by Southwest)/February 18, 2020 (US)
MPAA Rating: R
Teen pregnancy is scary…especially when your baby is killing everyone in town
Sara Steinberg (Mary Nepi) has finally made it. She’s a senior and running with the most popular students. When her former boyfriend Skyler Cole (Austin Fryberger) returns from a trip to Mexico, Sara breaks her decision not to sleep with him and finds unsafe sex can be deadly. Sara discovers in twenty-four hours she’s become nine-months pregnant and the “baby” wants out. Sara goes to her former friend Hayley Chamberlain (Gabrielle Elyse) for help despite their differences and Sara just hopes to keep her mom (JJ Nolan) out of the picture…but the creature inside her has different plans.
Written and directed by Stephen Cedars and Benji Kleiman (with additional scripting by Scott Yacyshyn), Snatchers is a horror comedy. The film premiered at South by Southwest and received relatively positive reviews.
Awe…it will look cute in a onesie
Snatchers fall in the line of a long tradition of combining horror with comedy. Bad horror always runs the risk of being funny, and many films have sidestepped that by just combining the laughs with the horror and social commentary. The film borrows from lots of other horror comedies for source material and manages to put it together for a somewhat unique horror comedy.
The story is about teen angst and teen sex. The characters find themselves telling adults over and over again that “they don’t understand”, and they really don’t. The problem is literally so alien to the adults of the movie that Sara and Hayley have to take care of the problem themselves. The scripts is fast and to the point, and it doesn’t dwell on the whys and hows of the story which works in this situation.
The story is led by women who aren’t damsels in distress nor are they hardcore action-queens. Mary Nepi and Gabrielle Elyse are both very normal looking teens and that is what the movie needed. Some of their friends are more over-the-top “mean girls” types, but the core women are girl-next-door realistic kids. The adults are led by JJ Nolan as Sara’s less than understanding mother, and goofy officer Oscar Ruiz who almost falls into a Scream Deputy Dewey role at points.
“MOM!”
The creature itself isn’t bad, but it feels like it could have been better. The practical effect creature that predominately is seen throughout the movie is kind of fun, but it also is little and doesn’t have much “personality” to it. The film ends with a bigger and more impressive creature in the last act, and it makes me wish that they had gotten to that “snatcher” faster. The shooting style seem in line with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films at points, and I’m sure the movie looked to them for tone and visuals. I assume the film had a relatively low budget, and in that sense, the filmmakers worked well within what they had access to.
Snatchers is a fun, quick horror film. It never takes itself too seriously and most of the “horror” results from sight-gags rather than jumps and scares. It is goofy, campy, and fun and worth seeking out. I could see a second pregnancy coming sometime and Snatchers 2 coming out someday as well…which wouldn’t be a bad thing.
