Burl reviews Hush! (2016)

Ha ha, quiet everybody, it’s Burl, here to review a new-style slasher picture called Hush! It’s a bit more refined than your typical 80s-era hack-‘em-up, but shares some real similarities! Ha ha, for example, both this picture and Friday the 13^th part 4 feature corkscrew deaths, ha ha; but in contrast to the Jason movie, this picture really skimps on the spaz-dancing!

The situation here is that a lady novelist with hearing issues is living alone in a house out in the woods, with only her fluffy white cat (who seems marked for death from the outset) and a pair of neighbours, with whom she is friends, and her indecision as to how she should end her latest thriller!

All of this is interrupted by brutal murder and mayhem! First to go is the neighbor lady, and her demise demonstrates the mean-spiritedness of this particular slasher-murderer! He wears a mask at first, the usual creepy featureless mask that we’ve seen in pictures like this since Halloween, but he removes it soon enough to reveal a face in need of a shave, ha ha! And with his crossbow and set a’ steak knives he clearly means business! Still, of course, our deaf lady Maddie is not going to take all this lying down, and, as in Misery, she will use everything in her writer’s toolkit to defeat the bearded menace! (But unlike in Misery, that will not include actual items in the toolkit, such as a typewriter, ha ha!)

The movie is not badly done, and there are some solid suspense scenes! Of course her hearing impairment is a factor, but not as much so as I’d thought it would be, and the incorporation of new technologies is not as clumsily done as in most modern horror pictures! There’s nothing really stellar here; no new ground broken; and while clearly that wasn’t the intention it might have been nice of the movie to give us a little something to remember it by! It’s the kind of movie that invites the application of the word “exercise,” like something that would be pulled off by the more talented students in the film school if their end-of-semester assignment was to demonstrate rote suspense! As such I will award Hush two unexpectedly hale and hardy pussycats! Ha ha!