In short: Orphan: First Kill (2022)

Warning: spoilers to come!

This somewhat unexpected – and a lot cheaper looking – prequel to 2009’s Orphan tells of the earlier adventures of child-impersonating little person serial killer Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman, reprising her role). After escaping from an Estonian asylum and a couple of murders, our protagonist manages to convince the authorities of being a lost American heiress.

Impersonating Esther, the daughter of the stinking rich Albrights – painter Dad Allen (Rossif Sutherland), mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) and rich jock son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) – comes naturally to our murderous heroine, but Leena’s customary love for Daddy only as well as some rather off-beat revelations regarding the family make her life rather more interesting than she probably expected.

For the first forty, forty-five minutes or so, Orphan: First Kill is a pretty terrible movie. It looks more like a cheap TV movie than an actual film (shot for streaming or not), director William Brent Bell bravely striding away from the technical merits of the Jaume Collet-Serra original into the lands of random indoor fog, shoddy lighting and an editing rhythm so generic and lifeless, it’s some kind of achievement. Parts of the visual and direction problems do of course come from the stunt idea of again casting the now fully grown Isabelle Fuhrman as Leena, a young woman who is most certainly neither a Little Person nor a child, so all kinds of cheap and obvious looking camera tricks have to be taken to at least make her look small; she also does a lot of acting on her knees. All of which doesn’t exactly lend itself to improve the visual style. Nor does it ever distract from the little problem that nobody would believe Fuhrman to be nine years old even if she were small, which turns much of the film ridiculous.

That the script does neither hold up to even the tiniest bit of logical scrutiny nor manages to deliver enough cool and interesting murder set pieces to distract from it does of course not improve things at this point, either.

Until, at about the half-way mark, First Kill turns into the most fucked-up and bizarre Lifetime movie imaginable, a movie where everyone but painter dad is a murderous psychopath and expresses this in the most delightfully overblown way possible, until Leena starts to look like the sane one. Bell’s direction and the whole Furhman not being a child anymore business still get in the way a little, but Fuhrman, Stiles and Finlan deliver a lot of vigorous scenery chewing. Even the script suddenly seems to realize that being (more than) a bit dumb is something that doesn’t have to get in the way of being entertaining in a trashy, twisty, over the top manner and begins delivering preposterous but fun nonsense by the minute.

In short: Cell (2016)

You know what, says one Hollywood producer to another, why not adapt Stephen King’s very worst book? Yup, the luddite one with the cellphone zombies. The kids love ‘em zombies, and they sure will dig the whole thing about technology being evil, right?

And don’t you think the book’s ending is just not bad enough? I’m sure we’ll be able to stitch something together that’s even worse! Quick, now tell me the director of a bad but commercially very successful horror film? James Wan? Nah, to stylish. How about Tod Williams? You know, Paranormal Activity 2? I’m sure his experience with nailed down cameras will be a great asset here.

Now we only need a star or two. How about Samuel L. Jackson? He’s willing to be in anything as long as he gets paid, and we don’t have to be afraid he’ll believe anything below his dignity. The white guy we need, hmm, big ego, big talent he’s never actually using, career declining painfully… That has John Cusack written all over it! And what if he looks so bored with what he’s doing he might as well be talking in his sleep? And while we’re at it, why not hire a young actress (Isabelle Fuhrman) who’ll actually put effort into our crap like an actual professional, and whose character will die an hour in to add insult to injury?

I’m pretty sure that is exactly what went through various producers’ heads when Cell was greenlit. There’s no explanation how bad this thing is that makes any other sense, no reason for this to be quite as offensively bad as it turned out to be. Apart from Cusack’s sleepwalking and Jackson’s (whom I love, but honestly…) whatever performance, you get direction that – particularly in the first half of the film – goes all out on the lazy director’s favourite methods to produce “tension”: shaky cam and fast inconsistent edits, which also just happens to be the ideal way to avoid having to think about the actual framing of scenes. In this context, it’s hardly a surprise Cell also has the usual bleached out colour scheme going on, nor that Williams manages to waste some choice opportunities to add some weirdness and creepiness it desperately needs to the film, wasting the Kaufman-bodysnatcher with digital noises tendencies of his monsters on scenes that always manage to sell as ridiculous what should be nightmarish.

Of course, given how desperately the script (co-written by King himself, which is usually a very bad sign) tries to push as many elements of the book into a hundred minute running time as possible, the poor guy really doesn’t have the time to prepare any of the more interesting set pieces properly. After all, we need to rush to the next bit of the book, leaving the narrative a tattered series of barely connected episodes that lack any kind of coherence, weight and even the most basic thematic throughline. And then there’s that ending, a thing so misguided, vague and unparsable, even John Cusack’s Nic Cage on a very bad day style cell phone zombie face can’t make it worse than it already is.

I honestly can’t understand how this project could end up being quite as bad as it is – it makes World War Z look downright decent by comparison.