Review: 'Spree' is a candy-colored but disgustingly sour slasher movie that's also a weak satire of social media
It’s hard to think of a movie that has such cynical disdain for everything it touches — its message, its cast, its audience — than what director Eugene Kotlyarenko brings to “Spree,” a putrid slasher movie told from the viewpoint of its cheerily and boringly psychotic killer.
Joe Keery, who’s so charming as the reluctant babysitter Steve Harrington on “Stranger Things,” stars here as Kurt Kunkle, a Los Angeles rideshare driver and would-be internet influencer. If only he could get the views on his live-streamed evening on the road above the single digits. He’s decked out his car with cameras all over to capture the action, and aims to enlist Bobby (Joshua Ovalle), a teen web phenom that Kurt used to babysit, to drive up his “likes.”
As Kurt explains in his stream-of-conscious rambling to the camera, he plans to have the most epic ride-sharing day ever. He’s got his complimentary water bottles ready, his car decked out with colorful lights, and intends to break records for most rides on the Spree service in a single day.
What soon become apparent is that Kurt isn’t going to get all his passengers to their destinations. The water bottles are poisoned, and if that doesn’t work, he has other, bloodier ways to dispatch the people he picks up.
Kotlyarenko and his co-writer Gene McHugh stack the deck for Kurt. His first passenger (Linas Phillips) is a white supremacist. Once he’s gone, Kurt picks up a rude real-estate agent (Jessalyn Gilsig), and then a sexist blowhard (John DeLuca). The first “normal” person Kurt has in his car is Jessie Adams (former “Saturday Night Live” performer Sasheer Zamata), a stand-up comic and web celebrity — whom Kurt tries and fails to impress with his own internet ambitions.
The story devolves from there, with Kotlyarenko setting up one gruesome murder after another, laden with Kurt’s annoyingly chipper banter and the constant feed of web commenters either egging Kurt on or doubting the bloodshed is real. There’s a message in here somewhere, about the dehumanizing effects of web culture, where being “liked” is more important than being a decent human being — but Kotylarenko buries the moral in self-consciously flashy editing and a during-the-credits epilogue that unfairly turns the filmmaking process and the audience into accessories.
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‘Spree’
★
Opening Friday, August 14, at the Megaplex Theatres, and available as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for extreme violence and gore, and language. Running time: 93 minutes.