Deadline

Deadline is a maddening watch. Ostensibly, I think the idea is of a horror writer who resents both his life and career and laments how it all starts to unravel, and some of the horror of the movie itself comes from vignettes of the stuff he’s made. But whatever the makers of this movie were intending doesn’t work, because everything they did is matched by a choice that seemed to invalidate or contradict it. The movie presents as horror, and the vignettes from his movies are 80’s horror movie gory. A guy gets caught in a combine, a woman dies choking on her own blood during childbirth as her unborn baby kills itself in the womb, two kids tie their grandmother to a bed and set her on fire. But at numerous points, characters in the movie decry horror as a genre and paint those who make it as smut peddlers and exploiters of misery. A major plot point even revolves around kids imitating a scene in one of his movies, resulting in a death. So, which is it, movie? Should we enjoy what we’re watching or be ashamed and concerned about its impact on society? As mentioned, the vignettes serve as the movie’s tip of the hat to the genre of the time, and they’re well done. But the movie goes through at least three of them before it decides to draw a connection between the main character’s writing and what they are, and even then, it never makes them contextually relevant. The movie just stops, out of the blue, to show a naked woman in a blood shower. It prevents the movie from having any flow, and because the scenes have no “real world” consequences, there’s no reason to care about them. The movie’s central character, Steven (nice name choice for a horror author, I wonder who served as inspiration), is supposed to be pitiable. He wants to evolve his writing beyond schlocky horror. His loves his wife, but she is pulling away from him and neglectful to their kids. His agent is constantly hounding him for pages and doesn’t want him to stop doing what makes money. But he’s also a writer of some pretty tacky, exploitative crap, and has obligations he willingly entered into. Despite living in the same house as his kids, he’s less an absentee father and more of a genetic material supplier, as he views their very presence as an annoyance. And he is emotionally cruel and dismissive to his wife, and bordering on physically abusive. The movie wants us to feel sorry for him as his life falls apart, but why in the hell should I, when he is a selfish, loutish, obnoxious ass. Not once can the movie provide him with a single redeemable factor, but I’m supposed to feel sorry for him as he crashes and burns. As if these glaring contradictions weren’t bad enough, the movie is just BORING. It has no interest in forward momentum or creating intrigue. For an hour of its runtime, it’s endless arguments and abusive behavior. It’s tiring and irritating and never interesting. When you add that on top of the movie contradicting itself at every turn, it adds up to an obscure movie that should stay buried.