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Random Acts of Violence
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| Year: |
2019
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Director: |
Jay Baruchel
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| Stars: |
Jesse Williams, Jordana Brewster, Jay Baruchel, Simon Northwood, Niamh Wilson, Isaiah Rockliffe, Clark Backo, Victoria Snow, Eric Osborne, Nia Roam, Aviva Mongillo, Wade MacNeil, Amir Sam Nakhjavani, Kyle Gatehouse, Mark Andrada, Julia Knope
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| Genre: |
Horror |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Todd (Jesse Williams) is a comic book writer whose biggest success has been Slasherman, a tale of a serial killer that he has run for some time now, its attraction for the fans being the inventive kills the antihero invents. But Todd has grown tired of the premise and longs to wrap the series up, therefore has been scripting a final issue, yet even so he is struggling to come up with a sufficiently smart conclusion. To take his mind off this problem, he has agreed to go on a signing tour of America and meet his fans, do a few interviews, generally drum up some support for his work, but he is about to discover that his biggest fan may well be the one who inspired Slasherman in the first place: a real-life serial killer.
Random Acts of Violence started life as a comic book itself (by Justin Gray) before actor Jay Baruchel decided to turn away from his comedy roots and script, direct and appear in a horror flick, adapting the source as a method of working out some matters he had been chewing over since he had matured from the Fangoria-reading teen who first got into this stuff all those years ago. The main subject he wanted to broach was what horror fans got out of seeing people killed in over the top ways, suggesting he was stuck in the eighties as far as the genre went as since then, yes, we had had the torture porn movies, but horror had thrown up so much more than that when there were all those ghosts and Satan efforts to consider, among other variations like folk horror.
Therefore this couldn't help but feel a little dated from the perspective of this far into the millennium, fine, horror's haters would be demanding to know why it was twisting the minds of the impressionable, but 'twas ever thus, and they did an even worse job than Baruchel in trying to find a link between screen violence and the real-life variety. Maybe more pertinent was the true crime obsession that had taken hold this century, where aficionados would pore over the gory details of genuine murders and get more of a kick out of those knowing they had happened, whereas horror movies were, in the main, all made up and therefore not worth approaching on the same level, fact trumping fiction in that respect. But somehow with there being not an evening going by without a television show devoted to some poor unfortunate's murder, that was more acceptable.
That kind of hypocrisy would have been fertile ground for further investigation, yet Baruchel fumbled a promising beginning where Todd is made to confront the ethics of his creation and its foundation in truth by developing into one of those "You made me do it!" accusations from murderer to fiction writer, a terrible cliche that pretty much never applies in life. Not to mention that the Slasherman comic, from what we see, looks painfully redundant and is difficult to discern what about it that would attract such a fan following, it's not well-drawn, there doesn't seem to be any story, and the sense of humour is non-existent. Then there's the further problem of confusing flashbacks where we see Todd's traumatic childhood, yet his younger self was played by a clearly black child - if you did not know light-skinned, blue-eyed Williams was half-African American, you would justifiably be baffled about who the kid was supposed to be and what connection he had to Todd. All in all, a provocative idea stumbled early, and no matter how bloody it got, it did a disservice to horror fans and itself. Music by Wade MacNeil and Andrew Gordon Macpherson.
[Random Acts of Violence will arrive on Blu-ray, DVD and digital on Monday 23 August 2021 from Acorn Media International in association with Shudder.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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