Saturday, September 09, 2023

She Never Died

  It's tough, being a cannibal immortal. That was already the case for Jack (Henry Rollins) in 2015's He Never Died, and it's still true in 2019 for Lacey (Olunike Adeliyi).
 The Experience has warped them in pretty different ways, though; Both are what you'd call antisocial, but while Jack lived as a recluse and ethically drank blood smuggled out of hospitals, Lacey has gone almost feral, is homeless, and freely murders/eats people as long as they're assholes.


 Not so much a sequel as a superficially similar story set in the same world but with another set of characters, you don't really have to know anything about the first movie to enjoy the sequel - but I'd still recommend watching both, because they're both really good.

 The plot's not that complex, but it's got a lot going on. A police detective (Peter McNeill) is monitoring the site of a suspected human trafficking ring group when Lacey just breaks in and kills a guy (who, to be honest, has it coming, playing Russian roulette against a dog for a live stream). During the altercation Lacey gets shot in the head, which doesn't even phase her, and she cuts off various chunks of the guy after gruesomely putting him down.
 The detective follows her to a nearby café, and in a very funny exchange, finds her to be surprisingly straightforward in her answers: Yes, she did cut off the guy's fingers, she was planning to snack on them; they're easy to carry, and have a lot of marrow.
 He takes it in stride, and ends up giving her a dossier on another douchebag, one he wants dead; in exchange, he offers Lacey his old apartment, complete with a fridge for her to store the severed body parts so she can nibble on them at leisure.

 The whole deal with the detective does end up making sense later, but for a while there the whole thing really sounds off. Good job MacNeill for making that work as well as it does.

 Meanwhile, the siblings who run the trafficking ring / snuff studio (Michelle Nolden and Noah Dalton Danby) become obsessed with obtaining Lacey. You'd think she'd be a goldmine for snuff filmmakers, right? She's basically a renewable resource; But no, they intend to sell her off to the highest bidder, since she's become a bit of a star on the ol' dark-webs. Seems like a waste.

 The movie is filled with fun/cool characters, but these two villains are by far the funniest; two young go-getters who deadpan great, ridiculous lines at a clip, like alternating between fussing over each other's health and then talking about torture and murder in the most frivolous way possible.

 There are some complications - Lacey gets saddled with a young adult (Kiana Madeira) who takes an interest in her situation and follows her around - but overall you can probably guess where things are headed. It's well put together, and the script (written by Jason Krawczyk) excels in adding weirdo details and humorous but completely deadpan asides. It's not quite as much of a comedy as He Never Died, but it's still a pretty damn funny movie.

 It's got a lot of fun gore, a couple of good fights and stunts (for a horror movie) and it pulls off a couple of fun gags just with editing. Director Audrey Cummings does a great job of keeping things engaging. She's helped by the cast - I wasn't a fan of the surrogate daughter character, who gets a surprising amount of screen time, but other than that they all make for good company. Otunike Adellyl does a particularly great job with the titular She - Lacey is a great creation, alternately savage, vulnerable, brutally honest and tortured, so it can't have been easy to pull it all off half as well as she did, and make her this fucking cool in the process.

 As on the first movie, things get a little biblical, and by the end the stage is set for an apocalyptic end to the trilogy. I hope they get to make it.

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