They

I feel like the German version makes the
poster at least suck a little less.

"The fear is real."

Hello everyone! Exciting news, over the course of last week, around Tuesday's post, The Tagline crested 50,000 lifetime hits! How exciting is that? Also exciting is that this Friday, The Tagline will be celebrating its one year birthday (since I re-started posting in earnest at least). To celebrate this momentous occasion, I'm going to post two reviews of two horror movies by Wes Craven, only one of them isn't really a horror movie, and the other isn't really by Wes Craven in any way. Today I'll be reviewing that one, the delightfully titled Wes Craven presents They. Normally when a movie is 'presented' by some well known director, they are at least an executive producer or something, but Wes Craven has literally nothing to do with this movie. He is credited on IMDB as the presenter, which I'm pretty sure is a made up thing.

So now that we've established that Wes Craven is presenting this the way a horse might present its ass to you, we can talk about the atrocious title. They. They. When I try and talk about this movie (which I seldom do), generally people get really confused, thinking that I'm starting a sentence, when really I'm just saying "have you seen they?" "have I seen that they what?" "who?" Like I get it, it's what everyone says in the movie "They will get me" "They are coming" but you couldn't call it Them? Or any of a number of other names that sound less stupid. I'm getting carried away about the name though, what about the actual movie itself?

This is Julia. She is going to get eaten by monsters, I guess.

Well I'd like to tell you something good, but instead I'm going to have to explain the plot of this movie. So like, there are these things (you know, THEY) that kidnap children and take them away. Apparently what they're doing is marking them chil'rens, so that they can come back when they're adults and eat them. They like to attack children who are scared of the dark, who typically after being abducted by shadow monsters grow into ADULTS who are scared of the dark. Not super surprising. Julia (Laura Regan) is a grad student of psychology, in a relationship with her bro boyfriend, the guy that Buffy dated after Angel left to have his own better show (yeah I went there). Then one night a childhood friend calls her to a diner all freaked out, and then kills himself because he's so scared that THEY will get him. Thus starts a serious downward spiral in Julia's quality of life. 

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What do we know about these things? Well they're scary, eat people maybe, and they cause the lights and other electrical things to fail. Also they make babies cry, an emotion I can really relate to after being forced to watch this movie. Julia also meets two other people at her friend's funeral who seem to be in the same boat. They're in the movie so that the monsters have people to kill while they are getting around to finally killing Julia. One of them is Ethan Embry who was in Can't Hardly Wait, which was a movie I hated a lot less (I actually like it quite a bit!) If thinking about this movie gets to be too much to handle, jump over there and read about that to take the sting out of it. Anyway, after Julia's friend tells her how the monsters get you, and then does the smartest thing anyone does in the movie by killing himself (sparing him the job of being in the rest of it) All the remaining living characters spend their time getting trapped in dark places alone, maximizing their chance of being murdered. Naturally they ARE murdered.

This is her looking back on her career in despair.

I remember going with my friends to see this movie in the theater when it was released. When you're in high school that's what you do: get persuaded by your friends to see shitty horror movies. I remember even then, at the age of 15 thinking that this movie, from title to end credits, was absolutely horrible. The credits do actually bear some of the responsibility for how shitty this movie is by the way, the music that plays over the credits is truly awful. A fitting end for a movie that was unbelievably shitty. It falls into the category of films that seem totally pointless because spoilers AT THE END the main character is dead or at the very least about to be eaten by shadow monsters. If the destination is pointless, and the journey is stupid and boring, what does that leave you left with?

It leaves you left with a movie that didn't quite manage to make back its 17 million dollar production budget.  It leaves you with a movie probably not worth the hour and a half you'll spend watching it. As a last note, it's worth mentioning that renowned spooky girl Jodelle Ferland plays a spooky girl in this movie too, despite the fact that she was eight at the time. 

That's all for today, join me on Thursday when I demonstrate that movies actually made by Wes Craven are not actually better.