There’s something cruel about pranks at their heart. Whether they’re framed as a challenge to society’s conventions or as a bit of fun, at the end of the day they’re about lying to people in order to make them upset or confused, because making people upset or confused gives the prankster pleasure. It’s sadism, bullying without physical violence. Sure, some are less harmful than others, but the constant is getting a laugh at someone else’s expense, from their discomfort and the humiliation once the prank is revealed. Pranks are fucking mean.
Which makes them, in theory at least, great fodder for a horror film. Not even just the idea of a prank gone too far (which certainly shows up on and off, especially in second and third-tier slasher films), but a film about someone who plays pranks that start off mostly harmless, but don’t stop, and just keep escalating, that relentless denial of any safe psychological ground, like the way tickling goes from amusing to straight-up painful when the tickler just won’t stop. I could see a really good film coming out of that approach.
I’m Just Fucking With You is not that film. It’s mean-spirited and nihilistic in a way that, I guess metatextually shares the nastiness of a prank, but it’s also poorly paced, surprisingly obvious for a film about pranks, and tonally confused.
We open on Larry Adams. He’s talking to someone on the phone (his sister, it turns out) as he’s driving out of town to attend a wedding. He’s not super-happy about going for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but he does talk his sister into getting a room at whatever sleazy little motel he’s picked out so they can hang out. And then once he’s done talking to her, he starts posting irredeemably nasty things on the bride’s Facebook page under the name “ProgrammingFlaw.” As it turns out, Larry is your standard troll. In real life he’s a quiet milquetoast of a man, but put him in front of a keyboard and he turns into a torrent of raging id, wishing death on total strangers, mocking anyone and everyone, spewing every last drop of bile from the safe distance of geography and anonymity. This, then, is our protagonist.
Larry gets to the motel - the Pink Motel and Lounge - and goes to check in. He finds nobody at the desk, nobody responds to the bell, and so he makes his way behind the desk, through the attached restaurant’s kitchen, and comes out in the lounge, where two men are sitting having a laugh. Gerald is a biker, having a beer, and Chester is behind the bar, making the drinks. They’re the only two in the place. Larry asks to check in, Chester tells him that if he pays in cash, he doesn’t have to charge him tax, so Larry forks over the 75 bucks in cash.
After a beer or two (and some tension when Larry demurs the offer of a drink), Gerald leaves, and Chester asks Larry for his credit card and a photo ID. But Larry already paid him cash for the room! Chester says he doesn’t know what Larry’s talking about - no way is he going to turn over the keys without a credit card and photo ID, just who does Larry think he is?
Chester’s face splits in a grin. “Relax, man - I’m just fucking with you.”
Chester loves his little jokes. He’s running the motel while the proprietors - an older couple - are away. He’s just your basic good-time guy. Likes to have a few laughs, likes to stir up some shit. And as it turns out, he knows Larry’s sister is named Rachel even though Larry hasn’t mentioned it.
So what I think we’re supposed to be taking away from this is the idea that Larry is trapped at this motel with someone whose constant joking masks something nastier. And that’s a good setup as far as it goes, but the film is rife with problems from the start. Larry is a thoroughly unsympathetic protagonist - he’s a mild-mannered germophobe (why a germophobe? I think it’s meant to make him more unlikable) who takes out his many resentments and frustrations on the world via the Internet, peppering any site or app possessing a comment function with verbal abuse, insults, and slander. The grievance that defines his life is getting dumped by a woman and being unable to handle the idea that she’s getting married. Which is painful, sure, but to be unable to move past it over time is the sign of someone just as stunted as Larry appears to be. So already this isn’t positioned as a film about putting people in danger as much as it is about some asshole getting a comeuppance wildly disproportionate to his sins. Which is less horror and more just sort of feeding people to the lions for our amusement.
It also purports to be a film about someone being subjected to increasingly more and more extreme pranks over the course of a night and handled right that could be a really good film, but it sort of abandons that premise halfway through. Pranks require a certain amount of deception, and we’re sort of lead to believe that this is going to be a film where at first Chester lies about small things, then larger things, and larger things, leading to some kind of reveal about what sort of danger Larry is really in. But, after the first act, there’s little to no deception to speak of - everyone is who they appear to be, and what appears to be going on is exactly what’s going on. I kept waiting for a big reveal or reversal that everything we’ve seen has been orchestrated as some grand theatrical lesson for Larry to get over himself, but it never comes. Oh sure, Chester’s dangerously unbalanced and eventually things lead to violence, but it’s all pretty predictable, which seems criminal for a film predicated on the idea of escalating deception. Thematically, then, this film forgets what it is pretty quickly.
Narratively, as well. There’s some promise at the beginning in the exchange between Chester, Larry, and Gerald that goes nicely from joking to menacing in a heartbeat, landing on exactly that kind of bared-teeth grin that sums up a typical prank - it’s funny on the surface, but entirely mean underneath, and more of that throughout would have developed the tension more successfully, tightening the screws more and more and more as the violence underneath became less and less hidden, but for a film with a narrative conceit that is supposed to have us questioning everything that’s going on, some of the big beats are really, really predictable, and behavior that at first seems like it’s because people are in on some larger joke turns out to just be poor writing. Chester is very much the antagonist, but if you’re going to make a film about someone who takes practical joking way too far, it makes better sense to have that character a constant fountain of laughs and bonhomie until the moment the façade cracks, until the laughter turns hysteric or gives way to screams, and that’s not the case here. Sometimes he’s joking, sometimes he’s not, but it’s only fitfully menacing, and when the turn comes, it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else.
This lack of a through-line extends to the design of the film as well. It’s lit throughout with the garish neon of the motel lounge (and contrasted nicely with the dated dinginess of the rooms), which makes sense for the film’s ostensible thesis - it reminds me of how
The Loved Ones similarly used bright colors to communicate the bright, happy façade over the antagonist’s violence, and there that discordance really worked. Here it
could work, but at the same time it’s also undermined by some puzzling choices for the musical score, which sound more appropriate to a comedy than to a horror film. The end result means the film is more easily read as a comic piece about this asshole Larry getting his wacky comeuppance (or uptight sad-sack Larry learning how to loosen up) in what could be a
Twilight-Zone morality play than it is a horror film, at least until the last act, when shit gets
really dark, and then it just feels confusing, like we’ve been watching two different movies. At one point, a drug-fueled interlude even adds a Looney Toons vibe to it, and it’s too silly to take it seriously, but the context is just nasty enough that you sort of have to. It muddles the experience considerably. Like, I think I see what they were going for, but it doesn’t land right, and it’s in the service of a pretty pointlessly unpleasant conclusion as well.
So we begin with a somewhat promising setup (albeit with a protagonist who is telegraphed as a punching bag early on), a muddled, inchoate middle that can’t develop the narrative gradually, and a final act that does bring some menace back into the picture, only to abandon it for a cut-rate approximation of
Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas-style drug hijinks that sort of come out of nowhere and land the ending of the film on a contrived, pointlessly ugly note. It starts off promising that nothing is as it seems, before showing us that everything is indeed exactly how it seems, and then tries to cheat its way out of that by making the protagonist an even bigger monster than the antagonist. It wastes a really interesting, neon-garish mise-en-scene, set in a tacky tiki-themed motel, on a story that doesn’t surprise as much as confuse and doesn’t frighten so much as appall, overlaying the final credits with screen captures from social media that make it seem like the filmmakers also tried to shoehorn in some moral about trolls and online culture in general, but none of it feels earned. Maybe it’s ironic, but a horror film about pranks needs to commit to that premise consistently - you could even say sincerely - to work, and this film doesn’t commit, and doesn’t work as a result.
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