This girl said it all already but I’ll just go off on her note for a moment. I’m yawning at the blatant obviousness of the movie “Horns” starring Daniel Radcliffe. Okay so I’m a little late– this movie came out last fall, but I was somewhat preoccupied backpacking across Europe and moving across the country. One might say “Better late than never,” but that shit doesn’t apply here. Although, I was in need of more evidence that violence against women is rampant in the entertainment industry. I mean there’s just no proof. It’s all “he said, she said.” #sarcasm Here is a movie in which a young girl is dead and her boyfriend (Harry Potter with an American accent) is the accused. The dead girl is Juno Temple, who I think is pretty cool albeit a little weird, but she works it. We’ll call her Merrin, since that’s her name in this piece of shit movie.
So Merrin has absolutely no substance at all, she’s one-dimensional, and the sole purpose of her existence is to be the object of desire for Harry Potter, his fratboy-esque best friend, and even Harry Potter’s older drug-addict brother Terry. Actually Harry Potter’s dad kind of sounded like he was in love with her, too. Whatever. They all love her because she’s beautiful and sacred and nymph-like. The movie is spent trying to solve who killed her, since Daniel Harry Potter Radcliffe claims it wasn’t him. It’s pretty obvious who did it, but eventually the truth is presented to us in a scene in which Merrin is not only murdered, but –you guessed it– raped beforehand. Someone please just gag me with an iPhone. How many more directors are going to throw this little “number” into their movies to make it a little more “interesting?” Actually, that’s more of a question for the writer of the story, which happens to be Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill. That’s unfortunate, because I happen to think Stephen King is kind of talented. Sorry that didn’t get passed down to your offspring, Mr. King.
So, as if that’s not already bad enough, let’s talk about the scene in which Merrin is raped and killed. She breaks up with Daniel Radcliffe, and then the fratboy-esque best friend finds her in the woods by her tree house, and he’s pissed because he loves Merrin and she doesn’t love him back because she’s still in love with Daniel Radcliffe (#clichelovetriangle) so he goes all batshit with jealous rage and pulls the ol’ “If I can’t have you, no one can!” Thus proceeding to rape and kill poor Merrin in the most overused act of violence ever known to this supposed entertainment industry. I’d also like to note one of the lines in the movie, which goes something like this: “Everyone loves a good sex murder!” This is no accident and this is clearly the thinking of the writer, expressed through dialogue of a female character. Sorry, but I don’t think you have a creative bone in your body if you have to resort to writing this scene in order to make your story more edgy.
By the way, the aforementioned quote by a female character was spoken by Veronica (Heather Graham), one of the only other female roles in the film. And guess what her forte is? Vanity. She thinks she’s beautiful and she wants to get famous, so she tells lies to the media to get her 15 minutes. Daniel Radcliffe gets revenge on her by sending snakes to destroy her face, thus making her ugly. Take that, women! One of you gets raped and killed and the other punished for being vain. Someone’s been reading too many biblical texts.
In an interview about the story, Joe Hill was asked how he dealt with writing such disturbing scenes as the one in which Merrin is killed. He weasels his way around replying and quickly passes the baton to Juno Temple, saying something along the lines of, “What’s really impressive is the actors who have to play out these scenes,” or whatever. And Juno Temple awesomely says something about how difficult the scene was and how very real and scary those situations are for women in real life. Really Joe Hill? You can’t even back up what you write? That’s because he wrote the scene for entertainment purposes and there’s no real sense of sympathy whatsoever. He wasn’t going to admit that though. It was crude, uncomfortable and out of place, and most of all, it added nothing to the story. Whatever hope that movie had of being remotely close to “good” definitely went out the window with that scene. Unfortunately we’ve seen this before and we will be seeing it again.
LIVING IN THE SPRAWL 