Movie Review: Fear Pharm

credit: Fear Pharm

The lengths that some folks will go to when trying to market the idea of the perfect skin cream is kind of intriguing, but in the long run, it becomes little more than another way to create a story that’s, well, kind of goofy and yet still entertaining enough to watch from start to end. One of the best ways to tell if a story is worth watching or not comes within the first ten to fifteen minutes, at which time it’s either best to turn it off or keep watching with the hope that things will get better.

Fear Pharm is one of many stories that has an interesting premise but somehow manages to trip over its own feet upon nearing the end. While the initial thrust of the movie, the idea of walking through an impressive and difficult corn maze, is a fun and engaging premise that could be taken in many different directions, it’s fair to say that Fear Pharm does surprise the audience with the motivations of the antagonists. Were it just another horror movie that made good use of a corn maze, it might have been different. Hell, it might have been a little better. 

credit: Fear Pharm

Corn mazes are kind of unsettling if one really thinks about it. 

If a corn maze is large enough, it’s not tough to get lost, especially if one has no sense of direction and can’t rely on their own intelligence to figure out which way to go. Even barreling straight through a corn maze and disregarding the well-worn paths isn’t a great idea since there are a lot of ways to get lost even further and turned around. Thankfully, the average corn maze isn’t a threatening structure, but it is a hotbed of ideas that can be cooked up in a number of different ways.

The use of the corn maze in this movie is kind of impressive since it’s used to confuse and divide the group of four friends that believe that they’ve been given a great opportunity to make a substantial sum of money for doing as little as possible. A lot could be said about that, but the best way to enjoy this movie is just to watch it without any preconceived notions of what’s going to happen and why. 

The acting wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t the best. 

In all honesty, the acting was about what one might expect from a movie of this caliber since it feels as though, with a slight push in the right direction, Fear Pharm might have been able to become something truly impressive.

The acting was good enough for a movie that was meant to be a step or two above a schlocky horror flick, but it doesn’t go nearly as far as it could for a number of reasons that likely have more to do with the dialogue than anything else. This tends to happen in a lot of horror movies, though why the dialogue sounds choppy at times is hard to figure out, especially since, with a mother, less erratic pauses between the actors might come off as more natural. 

credit: Fear Pharm

The antagonists were kind of scary but not terrifying. 

Let’s be honest here, the actors who played the antagonists were scary because of the corn maze and the manner in which they danced in and out of it at will. This is effective simply because it shows that the villains know their terrain, how to use it to the best effect, and how to turn it against those who think they’re smarter because they don’t understand what’s at stake.

The arrogance and ignorance that goes with being the protagonist at times is kind of funny to watch since those who think they’re smarter simply because they don’t come from the region in which they now find themselves or because the antagonist might be a little backward in their ways, are often those who have the hardest time surviving a horror movie. In a few ways, it’s kind of fitting, to be honest, even if that sounds a little vindictive. 

The twist at the end wasn’t hard to follow, but it was kind of tough to accept. 

At the end of this movie, one might have expected that the deranged family was keeping the last individual alive for some grand, supposedly clandestine reason. It was because she had good skin and, therefore, good genes that the family could use to…wait for it…create a superior skin cream that they could market to people. Yeah, that was the ‘grand vision’, to sell skin cream made from the actual skin of their victims. Does anyone else feel cheated? This could have been an extremely terrifying movie, but it feels more likely that the idea was to double down on the ridiculous nature of the story.