Director: Jay Baruchel
Notable Cast: Jesse Williams, Jordana Brewster, Jay
Baruchel, Niamh Wilson, Simon Northwood
The boom of comedian type actors, writers, and filmmakers
making the leap into horror lately is fascinating. Not that the change-up of
genre is shocking, in so many ways comedy and horror have an incredible number
of elements in common, but that’s more or less for a fully separate discussion.
What makes it fascinating is that the industry is not only making the
connections between the two, but it – in some regards – is fully embracing it.
Between the rise of Jordan Peele as one of the faces of modern horror to the
combination of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride on Halloween ’18,
the combination has proven to be successful in quality and in the box office.
Perhaps this is why it was a bit shocking to see Jay
Baruchel’s sophomore effort not garner more attention. Random Acts of
Violence, also written by the long time Seth Rogan gang collaborator, sees
the actor/writer/director strut into the slasher genre with a modern sense of
style in spades. Telling the story of a comic book author Todd (Jesse Williams)
who is struggling to write the last chapter of his slasher comic Slasherman, he
takes his boo, his manager, and an intern on the road to promote the comic
while desperately trying to come up with an ending to the series. When a real
slasher killer, the inspiration for the comic, starts to follow them on the
road and recreating the kills from the comic, the group and Todd will have to
reckon with reality, fiction, and how the two eventual collide in bloody ways.