LET'S SCARE JULIE (2020)

Studio:      Shout Studios
Director:    Jud Cremata
Writer:      Jud Cremata
Producer:  Jud Cremata, Marc Wolloff, Nick Sarkisov, Eryl Cochran
Stars:     Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson, Isabel May, Odessa A’zion, Brooke Sorenson, Jessica Sarah Flaum, Blake Robbins, Dakota Baccelli, Valorie Hubbard, Bill Timoney

Review Score:

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Summary:

Five teens experience an unexpectedly terrifying night when they try to prank a mysterious girl in a house across the street.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While her alcoholic father Frank sleeps downstairs in their Newhall, California home, teenager Taylor entertains her friends Madison, Jess, and Paige, as well as her cousin Emma, who recently began living with Taylor. A voodoo doll stolen from the house across the street prompts Taylor to tell everyone that her former neighbor Ms. Durer was a recluse rumored to be involved in the supernatural. Before Ms. Durer died, Taylor had a friend who tried to learn more about the mysterious woman. Taylor’s friend began having haunting experiences including having a picture sent to his phone that was somehow taken from behind him. He subsequently disappeared in his own home.

Emma mentions that a girl named Julie, who keeps her face hidden, just moved into Ms. Durer’s old house with her father. Taylor, Madison, Jess, and Paige leave to prank Julie by sneaking into her home while wearing masks. Emma stays behind with her little sister Lilly.

Paige rushes back to Taylor’s house in hysterics. Paige tells Emma that something horrible happened at Julie’s.

Lilly vanishes from her bedroom. Emma finds a voodoo doll on her sister’s empty bed.

Madison returns, but says she did not experience anything unusual while in Julie’s house. Madison reveals Taylor left to pick up her mother at the airport. Emma becomes worried when Madison adds that Taylor did not leave with Lilly.

After Paige recounts seeing Julie with a strange face and having a seizure, Madison calls Jess to find out what is going on. Jess cries and screams before the call cuts out. Madison returns to Julie’s alone to look for Jess.

Emma finds Uncle Frank shouting at Julie’s house from the doorstep while wearing a bloody shirt and clutching a gun. Drunk and dazed, Frank tearfully tells Emma about the time he accidentally shot a boy who turned out to be Ms. Durer’s son.

Madison’s mother calls. She tells Emma that she received a goodbye message in which Madison cryptically claimed Ms. Durer was going to kill all of the girls for what they did to Julie.

Emma hears Paige muttering that no one is coming back. Emma opens the bathroom door to discover Paige disappeared.

Emma calls Madison’s phone. Lilly answers. Lilly says Madison disappeared through the floor. Lilly tells Emma she is trapped in the house and needs her sister to rescue her.

Emma sneaks into Julie’s house. Emma finds Julie dead, disfigured, and wrapped in bandages. Emma also finds a photograph of Shannon, a girl she bullied into suicide.

Emma rescues Lilly from a closet. Julie’s father chases the sisters out of the house. After returning home, Emma sees Ms. Durer’s ghost standing in the street.

Taylor calls Emma from the airport. Emma tells Taylor about the Shannon photograph and also explains that they seemingly scared Julie to death.

Ms. Durer appears in Taylor’s house. Emma hides in the bathroom. On her phone, Emma receives a photo taken of her from behind, just as Taylor’s friend did before he disappeared. Emma tries fleeing down the staircase, but something attacks her.

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Review:

“Let’s Scare Julie” didn’t look like my bag from the beginning. The plot puts five slumber-partying girls in a possibly paranormal predicament when they decide to prank the mysterious teen who moved into a haunted house across the street. I’ve vicariously attended more scary movie sleepovers than I can count. At my age, I don’t need to attend one more. Add in a vague anti-bullying theme, which also isn’t overly relevant to adult interests, and we’ve got a second way in which the movie ostracizes me from its ideal audience.

But I’m a sucker for cinematic gimmicks, and “Let’s Scare Julie” has one. Although there are a couple of cuts, “Let’s Scare Julie” unfolds in real time and is shot to look like one continuous take. That’s a cool concept. It’s also where the film’s ingenuity both begins and ends.

“Let’s Scare Julie” has no narrative need for the single take style. The sole benefit it provides is attracting eyes like mine to a routine thriller that’s nothing more than forgettable filler. Hats off, I guess, for coming up with a way to make me notice a movie I wouldn’t have given the time of day to otherwise. Yet what difference does it make when a ho-hum horror film loses my attention so quickly, it’s like I never knew it existed in the first place anyway?

“Let’s Scare Julie” doesn’t appear carefully choreographed like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope.” Rather than artful blocking where inventive angles and snaking movements turn the camera into a character, this lens plainly follows people around, like the operator simply pressed record and went at it without a rehearsal. Shot with her almost always in frame, main girl Emma goes across the street once and up/down staircases a few times. Other than those sequences, the camera usually stays confined to one room at a time. It merely points, pans, and basically documents events instead of becoming a creative device to motivate them.

Opening introductions are an excruciating test of patience. Possibly because they are ad libbing in lieu of adhering to a strict script, the five girls feverishly talk over one another in a continuous cacophony of noise. 60 seconds or so of exposition explodes. Its shrapnel then gets scattered around 20+ minutes of irrelevant walla-walla where boredom breeds boorishness to establish these mean girls as obnoxious. One of the teens, Madison, goes all in on her troublemaker persona to a point where I wished whatever fright was on its way would jump the gun and kill her before the first act finished.

I will credit the young actresses for giving this setup a sincere go. Their effort may be in service of an ultimately underwhelming endeavor. I’m not surprised to see a two-year gap between “Let’s Scare Julie’s” 2018 copyright date and 2020 release, as I can understand why distributors would wonder if viewers would bother with such a meager movie. But long takes present a tough challenge to performers still cutting their teeth on the trade, and these girls are game to get into it as much as they can.

Another odd gap occurs within the movie. Emma stays behind while her four friends don light-up ‘Purge’ masks and run across the street to yell “boo!” at Julie, whom we never actually see, which is pretty funny for a movie with her name in the title. Emma then puts her little sister Lilly to sleep. Moments later, Lilly vanishes. Regarding the disappearance, Emma tells one of the girls who returns, “It’s fine. Taylor (Emma’s cousin) probably just realized what time it was and she went to the airport to pick up her mom and she probably took Lilly with her.” Really, Emma? Even disregarding the strange stuff going on, this is what you think happened in the last three minutes barely 10 feet from your bedroom?

That anecdote indicates how “Let’s Scare Julie” tosses stuff into a story pot without thinking through how anything melts into a sensible stew. Early on, we see Madison getting reckless with a handgun as a joke. Nothing comes of it. Emma texts someone named Jordy, though that relationship doesn’t bear any fruit on the fiction either. Drunk uncle Vince, dressed in a bloody shirt for no known reason, tells a tearful story about accidentally shooting a neighborhood boy. Then Vince immediately evaporates into thin air. Emma lives with Taylor due to her own father’s death. Knitted voodoo dolls pop up in odd places. In addition to Julie having her own urban legend due to disguising a disfigurement, there’s also the matter of mysterious Ms. Durer who lived in the same house and was rumored to be involved in the occult.

These various backstory bits mix together about as well as oil and water. If Julie and Ms. Durer were connected somehow, if an incident with another bullied girl who killed herself was relevant, if Uncle Vince’s manslaughter mattered, or if Emma was otherwise cursed due to her father’s death or the stolen voodoo doll, I missed how the movie made tied loose ends together.

Since we’re stuck at home with Emma for most of the movie, whatever eerie encounters the other girls have while pranking Julie are never shown. “Let’s Scare Julie” still gets weird in a way where you get anxious with wanting to know what’s really going on. Then it ends on a cheap cut to black as you realize maybe the movie never had any endgame in mind after all.

“Let’s Scare Julie” feels like the filmmaker had an inkling of an intriguing idea for a mystery. Unsure where to take it, he then seemingly said, “eh, I’ll just film it on the fly to look like one take. Let the gimmick do the heavy lifting instead of figuring out a solid story.” That’s a good trick for getting someone to watch “Let’s Scare Julie.” That’s not nearly enough to get someone to like it.

Review Score: 35

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