Becky (2020)

A year after the cancer death of her mother, thirteen year old Becky (Lulu Wilson) is still in the anger phase of grief, and hardly anyone can be angry as fiercely as someone in her puberty, as her father Jeff (Joel McHale) has clearly beginning to realize. He’s not completely innocent when it comes to causes for Becky’s mental state, one suspects, for what father in his right mind would expect his daughter to react positively when he uses their weekend together at a lake (and wood) house she strongly associates with her mother to surprise her with the news he’s going to marry his new girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel), who is also a surprise guest with her little son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe). Cue exactly the sort of reaction you’d expect from a girl whose father is clearly an idiot.

The weekend’s going to get much worse than this particular version of hell on Earth, though, for a gang of freshly escaped prisoners led by Nazi alpha prick Dominick (Kevin James, who is a much better portraying said Nazi prick than he ever was as a comedian) have set their eyes on some McGuffin hidden in the house. You can imagine how much he’s into the idea of a mixed race couple like Jeff and Kayla, too. Becky, it turns out, is not the kind of teenager you want to piss off by doing violence to her father, though, and rather a lot of blood will flow.

I had a lot of fun with this neat genre mash up by directing duo Jonathan Milott and Cary Munion (also responsible for Cooties and the woefully underrated Bushwick I really need to get around to writing up one of these days), though it’s not a film made for the squeamish or those with little interest in sometimes nasty, sometimes silly yet always highly effective genre filmmaking.

The film is full of little twists and improvements on genre standards, the directors clearly having spent a bit of thinking time on how to improve certain weaknesses of the handful of genres whose elements they are using, asking questions like “wouldn’t home invasion movies not be much improved by making the villains Nazis instead of simply poor people?”. To which the answer obviously is “hell, yeah!”. The film is also using some evil child tropes, but reversing those by providing that child with a bit more of a motivation than being born bad and also making her the clear hero of the piece (what with her murdering Nazi pricks in various ways).

The film also seems to want to say something about the nature of violence as a nearly infectious thing, as well as about the psychological price to be paid by those committing it through scenes between Becky and the doubting bad guy Apex (Robert Maillet), but these moments don’t work as well as one would hope in a film that has way as much fun letting a child kill grown men in very improbable and very entertainingly gory ways as this one does. The film is just too lovingly ultraviolent and silly to sell any anti-violent message, or to convince me of psychological veracity.


That’s not a terrible flaw here, mind you, for the directors are terribly adept at letting the violence and the tension flow, producing so many moments of excitement and violent fun, I can cope with this not being the effective message movie some parts of the internet tell me it is just fine. Come for the deep insight into the violent mind, but stay for the awesome eye mutilation, or something like that.