Last night, my friends, the Snarkalecs, and I watched the latest SyFy original film, The Crooked Man!

Why Were We Watching It?

Gawdamn, y’all (as we tend to say down here in Texas), do you remember how much fun it used to be when SyFy would premiere a different movie every Saturday night?  Back when I first started regularly watching SyFy and live tweeting with the Snarkalecs, SyFy was all about original movies.

Sadly, things have changed.  Now, we only get SyFy original movies twice during the year.  Once is during the week leading up to the latest Sharknado film.  The other time is October, when SyFy does its 31 Days of Horror.

Since the Snarkalecs are still trying to change SyFy’s policy towards original movies, we make it a point to watch every single one of them.  We also make it a point to tweet about the movies, the hope being that someone at SyFy will see that there is an audience for original movies.

That’s what we were doing last night as we watched The Crooked Man.

What Was It About?

Olivia (Angelique Rivera) gets all of her friends killed but isn’t ever really held responsible because she’s the main character in the film.

Okay, there’s actually a little more to it than that.  The Crooked Man is a hybrid of The Ring, It Follows, Candyman, Slenderman, The Nun, and … well, just about every other horror film made over the past 16 years.  It starts with a slumber party, where a group of 12 year-old girls make the mistake of listening to a song online.  The song, it’s said, will summon the Crooked Man.

Later, the slumber party is interrupted when all the lights go out.  Fortunately, there’s also a pizza delivery guy at the party and he knows how to turn the lights back on.  Well, that’s good.  However, there is yet another interruption when one of the girls, Jill, is found dead at the foot of the stairs.  Standing over her is Olivia.  Though Olivia has a knife in her hands, she swears that she didn’t kill Jill.  It was … THE CROOKED MAN!

Olivia is sent to a mental asylum for six years.  When she’s released, she returns home.  The problem is that nobody in the town wants her to come home.  And actually, they have a point because, as soon as Olivia returns, The Crooked Man starts killing everyone who was at that slumber party.

EVEN THE PIZZA GUY!

What Worked?

I will be the first to admit that most of my tweets were pretty critical last night but there were a few effectively creepy moments in The Crooked Man.  The Crooked Man himself was scary.

The Voice‘s Dia Frampton showed up to sing a song and then promptly got killed.  That definitely provided the film with a nice WTF moment.

What Did Not Work?

Okay — so the Crooked Man can only get you when you’re in the dark, right?  SO WHY DOES EVERYONE IN THE FILM KEEP TURNING OFF ALL THE LIGHTS!?  Seriously, nobody seemed to appreciate that there was a really easy solution to most of their problems…

(Actually, in all fairness, The Crooked Man had the power to kill all the electricity and plunge people into darkness.  But still, it did seem like the characters often never even considered trying to turn on all the lights.  I would have at least liked to have seen some sort of effort.)

“OMG!  Just like me!” Moments

I related to the character of Violet.  Violet was at the slumber party and therefore, she was on Crooked Man’s kill list.  And Violet put the blame right where it belonged.  On Olivia!

Seriously, Olivia, way to get all your friends killed.

Lessons Learned

If a monster can only exist in the dark, turn on the damn lights!