Delayed Reaction: Some Kind of Hate

Premise: The kids at a reform camp are picked off by the vengeful spirit of a girl who died there.

I get why there's an overlap between fans of horror and fans of metal music. They are both designed to challenge what polite society finds acceptable. There's a lot of satanic imagery in each. There's an outcast appeal to them. I've accepted that there will be stuff like a superfluous metal song thrown in at the end of V/H/S. But, I'm really not a fan of horror movies that just assume the people watching it will also like metal.

Some Kind of Hate has a number of non-metal reasons that I didn't care for it. The moment the movie lost me though is when the main character gives a playlist to the girl he likes and say she probably won't like it because she's a cheerleader. He then goes on to poetically profess his love of metal music. To start with, every single thing about Gracie Gillam's character screams "I'm a metal chick". The cheerleader detail is just funny. Troubled guys get to be loners at school. Troubled girls have to be former cheerleaders. I feel like I can assume a lot of things about the people who made this movie based on that.

Honestly, what turned me off in this film more was all the suicide imagery. I wouldn't call this "torture porn", but it's definitely a movie that's exploitative about the violence. It's full of throat, thigh, and arm cutting. Moira (Sierra McCormick) literally has a neckless of razors. I don't do needles and I don't do razors. That's a personal threshold for me. This movie does reflect a different horror ethos in general than I care for. It's really not a scare movie or a suspense movie. It's just a bloody revenge movie. It barely even counts as horror in my book. It's more of a gruesome thriller perhaps. The supernatural element does make it undeniably horror though.

Anyway, I didn't care for this movie. It relished the violence too much. It wastes a surprisingly strong cast on a script with thin characters and lazy dialogue. The one unique element was the idea of a slasher movie villain who does damage to the victims by doing damage to herself. That's a cool idea, although not one that I physically enjoy watching. I'll be a little generous about this movie because I recognize that a lot of my feelings have to do with personal taste more than quality.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend