Smile (2022)

Even though I mainly watch movies where the entire cast is dead, somehow I made time recently to watch Smile. Why? Beats me. I saw this movie was #10 on Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Horror Movies of 2022 list and perhaps that birthed some morbid curiosity. I also read how Smile grossed $216 million with a $17 million budget, maybe that played a part. I think I just wanted to challenge myself to watch something on Paramount Plus unrelated to Star Trek. I’ll say this about Smile, it’s better than any episode of Voyager about Species 8472 or Seska having a rape baby with Chakotay. Poor Seska, she had the potential to be a great villain. Her aligning with the Kazon gave that D list species a reason to exist and I really loved her postmortem episode, Worst Case Scenario. Alright, back to the schlocky horror movie.

Can someone even write about a movie this dumb? Smile is one of those mind numbing experiences that’s impossible to summarize. I was expecting the routine new horror film experience, a revolving door of loud sound cues masquerading as a movie that this genre has devolved into. Instead Smile was closer to a comical equivalent of going to a zoo and watching a masturbating monkey. Nothing summarizes the amusing stupidity like a scene where the main character in their manic state induced by some supernatural element gifts their dead pet to a child. Usually the death of an animal is an inexcusable distraction because, unless it’s a movie like John Wick that acknowledges what a life altering act of terror that is, it’s the laziest attempt to induce an emotional reaction. Somehow a moment usually so offensive transpiring in a clown show like Smile was entirely ineffective. It reminded me of when I watched Dumb and Dumber as a child and thought the funniest thing ever was a blind child unaware their newly purchased pet was a headless parrot. It’s fitting that I’d be reminded of a movie titled Dumb and Dumber while attempting to explain Smile.

We exist during a time when every horror film feels obligated to comment on trauma and even though Smile possesses the intellectual integrity of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, it also feels compelled to follow this trend. Somehow this cheesy B movie ends up at a point where the main character returns to their abandoned childhood home where their mother fatally overdosed. Imagine if in America, the land of Oxycontin and Fentanyl, every home where somebody died from an overdose was abandoned. I picture an alternative existence populated by old Granville Houses where a teenage George Bailey tosses rocks at the few remaining panes outnumber actual homes with electricity.

In case I got lost in that It’s A Wonderful Life tangent I’ll say it again, this junk food movie attempts to possess integrity by following a character consumed by childhood trauma brought on by failing to save their mother from overdosing when they were 10. This is why people pass over movies like Smile to pay $30-40 for a special edition Blu-Ray of some piece of shit 80s slasher. Those antique Halloween/Friday the 13th knockoffs still attract people because at least they’re willing to acknowledge they’re cheap exploitation films. Mediocre horror films from the past never felt embarrassment and suddenly rushed to be insincere commentaries on trauma during their 3rd act. Those films tended to tell their audience “here’s all that crass gore we promised and as a bonus, we’re also showing you Linnea Quigley’s tits and Michelle Bauer’s bush.” While Smile prompts more laughs than any mainstream film currently being marketed as a comedy, I also took in this disastrous mess and longed for that bygone moment in time when every horror film wasn’t obligated to be a serious drama because real dramas like Ordinary People and The Big Chill could get made and make a profit. 99 percent of the horror genre is cheap exploitation and it’d be for the best if more horror filmmakers realized capturing what Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining is less realistic than being able to suck your own cock like Lanny Poffo. Unfortunately, I get the impression bland supernatural dramas we’ll forever be the norm because the people who end up making horror films refuse to acknowledge they possess a skill set better suited for sleazy amusing experiences reminiscent of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Evil Toons and Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies.

This has been my attempt to summarize Smile, a movie that reminded me of the laugh riot, “this movie is too dumb to exist” atmosphere of other recent schlocky horror movies like Truth or Dare and Halloween Kills.