Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In: Malignant

Tumor Fu

By Joe Bob Briggs

    NEW YORK—Nobody likes it when a new Batshit Crazy genre is created.

    Let me correct that. Nobody likes it within the precincts of Los Angeles County when the Batshit Crazy genre shows up.

    Fortunately James Wan, the Australian mega-grossout mega-spook with three horror franchises, is at a level where people say “yes, James, you can do that” before he finishes asking to do anything.

    So apparently Jimmy had a meeting where he said “I need a gazillion dollars to make a movie about a cancerous tumor that becomes a vengeance-seeking monster taking on the tactical resources of the Seattle Police Department.”

    And then, after thirty people said, “Yes, James, you can do that,” they asked a few polite questions like:

    But the monster will become human, like Jason or Freddy, it won’t be just, you know, a tumor?

     Uh, no, probably not.

    But it will have all those Conjuring-style jump-scare haunted-house things in it, as the tumor enters the nightmares of little girls?

    Nope, not even close.

     Not doubting your artistic choices at all, James, but what does the tumor actually DO?

     I’m gonna work in a lot of knife play. Swords, machetes, penetration weapons.

    The tumor is gonna carry a knife?

    Swords, machetes, penetration weapons.

    Okay, James, and does the tumor talk?

    Broadcasts its thoughts through boom boxes that happen to be in every location.

    Does the tumor do anything else?

    Yeah, it switches lights on and off at will. Control over electrical currents.

    Electrical currents?

    Electrical currents.

    James, this sounds Batshit Crazy.

    I was thinking about calling it Batshit Crazy but I’m just calling it Malignant.

    Okay, James, pick up your check on the way out. Did you say four million or forty million?

    That would be forty. We’re working with an animated tumor here, guys.

    Forty it is!

     And so we get the most original horror flick of 2021 and the media also gets a little queasy, because it doesn’t fit into any subgenre known to man. Yeah, it’s got haunted-house stuff. Yeah, it’s got David Cronenberg creepy-research-facility vibes. Yeah, it’s technically Body Horror. But it’s also Batshit Crazy, until . . .

    You do a little research into the nature of teratomas. Teratoma is the Greek word for “monstrous tumor,” meaning tumors that contain hair, muscle, bone all mixed together in weird formations, but here’s the best part: they sometimes contain brain cells.

    It’s batshit but it’s not crazy. It’s not as far-fetched as it seems at first.

    But before I get into the drive-in totals on this baby, I would like to ask a question about what I call Unit Creep.

    In the kind of movie I’m most familiar with—the Roger Corman guerrilla cheapie—there’s only one unit. Meaning, the cameraman is the cameraman—he shoots every single nanosecond of the film, including the closeups of somebody stubbing out a cigarette and the drone shots of the El Lay skyline and the exploding brain in the special effects blue-screen room.

    But increasingly, if you talk to people who work on movies, especially bigger budget movies, you get, “Oh, he didn’t shoot any of that. That was all Second Unit. The director wasn’t even on the set.”

    And sure enough, if you study the credit rolls, the Second Units are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So you have all these directors now who are not the real director, but they’re shooting large chunks of the movie.

    Okay, I get it. Sometimes you need to send a few guys over to the action set to shoot the wheels on the chariots and the car flying off the cliff. But we now have Second Units that are bigger than the only unit on some horror films.

    So on Malignant, we have a pretty large Second Unit.

    Then we have a “Seattle Unit.” The movie is set in Seattle, so apparently they decided, “Hey, we don’t have to actually go to Seattle, we’ll just send forty guys up there to run around getting shots of the Space Needle in a torrential thunderstorm.”

    And then, after the First Unit, the Second Unit, and the Seattle Unit, James Wan decided he needed something credited as “Additional Unit.” No telling what those guys shot. Tabletop photography of the spooky haunted asylum where the Monster Tumor originated?

    I don’t wanna say James is lazy, but when you have a hundred additional people assigned to “units”—and I’m not even talking about the stuff that comes in from independent special effects labs—aren’t you kind of saying, “Some shots don’t matter”? Instead of the correct film school principle, which is, “Every shot matters, and every inch of every frame matters.”

    Just saying. It’s a trend.

    Okay, Malignant is the sensitive story of Madison, an abused wife living in the gloomiest house in Seattle who keeps having miscarriages, most recently because her Significant Other punches her in the stomach on the same night that he gets his face squashed like a mushmelon by a spectral presence shot by the Spectral Presence Unit. Pretty soon she starts waking up from nightmares and calling her sister to say that apparently she witnessed a gory murder committed by a scarface ninja parkour-loving wall-climbing sadist. When some underwritten cops show up to investigate the various scenes of slime-glopola body parts, they start to wonder why every serial-killer clue leads back to the brooding brunette with the nightmares. The enterprising sister journeys to the abandoned research hospital on a gothic promontory and discovers the explanation in a brown box that contains the entire case file on our murder suspect along with some nifty VHS tapes showing exactly what’s eating her brain. Miraculously, when they abandoned the hospital 18 years ago, the doctors failed to take that box with them, allowing us to see the monster revealed at the second-act climax as the enterprising sister and the quizzical mom binge-watch the medical records together. Meanwhile, the cops are using hypnotherapy to find out what Madison’s brain knows, not realizing until it’s too late that she’s sharing the brain with an aggressive tumor named Gabriel.

    Sure we’ve seen it before, but have we seen it with a women-in-prison subplot? I think not.

    We have:

    27 dead bodies.

    Fist through the head.

    Orderly tossing.

    Attic rafter-bondage, with torture.

    Trophy brain-bashing.

    Sword to the face.

    Neck-ripping.

    Head-stomping.

    Tummy-slashing.

    Bullet to the cabeza.

    Mom-strangling.

    Multiple cop dismemberment.

    Pregnancy-ending stomach punch.

    Tortured-mom through the ceiling.

    Human-shield bully-riddling.

    Exploding pacemaker, with splatter.

    1 creature chase under downtown Seattle.

    1 gang girlfight with beatdown.

    1 dumpster dive.

    3 excellent transformation scenes.

    Multiple yowling.

    Menacing stereo FM growling, with static.

    Random house scares, including spinning and seething walls, howling-wind window-busting.

   Spooky kitchen appliances.

   Gratuitous Seattle tourism.

   Teratoma Fu.

   Electroshock Fu.

   Street-lamp Fu.

   Power-tool Fu.

   Iron forge Fu.

   Hypnotherapy Fu.

   Multiple thunderstorm Fu.

   Attempted butcher-knife Fu.   

   Drive-In Academy Award nominations for:

    Annabelle Wallis as the tumor-tormented would-be mom who keeps repeating “It’s all in my head!” and then finds out what’s in her head;

    Jacqueline McKenzie as the female version of Dr. Loomis, for saying “He got out again!” and “He wants to go home” and “You’ve been a bad bad boy, Gabriel” and “It’s time to cut out the cancer”;

    Maddie Hasson as the sister who journeys to the empty gothic research institute to find a box full of exposition;

    Michole Briana White as the wiseass police detective who says “So I’m putting out a BOLO on Sloth from The Goonies?”; and

    James Wan, the co-writer and director, for doing things the drive-in way, as usual.

    Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out.