Horns (2014)

How much honest truth can you really handle? In October 2014, Ig found himself cursed… to hear the truth.

Directing this 120 minute drama/fantasy/horror/thriller is Alexandre Aja.

Starring in this cursed tale is: Daniel Radcliffe as Ig Perrish, Mitchell Kummen as Young Ig Parrish, Juno Temple as Merrin Williams, Sabrina Carpenter as Young Merrin, Joe Anderson as Terry Perrish, Max Minghella as Lee Tourneau, Kelli Garner as Glenna Shepherd, Michael Adamthwaite as Eric Hannity, James Remar as Derrick Perrish, Kathleen Quinlan as Lydia Parish, David Morse as Dale Williams and Heather Graham as Veronica.

Ig just lost the love of his life, Merrin, and to make matters worse, everyone thinks it’s his fault she’s dead. Just when he thought he had hit rock bottom… Ig’s life takes yet another dark twist when he wakes up one morning to what appears to be horns growing out of his forehead. However, with his horns comes a cursed gift, which Ig is going to use to find out who really did kill Merrin.

This one is based off of the novel Horns (2010), which was written by Joe Hill. Then writer Keith Bunin sat down and wrote out the screenplay for it. Never reading the book, I don’t know how close the movie came to hitting the mark with the book’s version of the story.

The storyline for this one was pretty cool. It caught me because it’s one of those stories that could happen in real life, so you have that realism to attach to, but with a huge fantasy twist. The script is witty and pretty well written, but it’s not just some hokey cute flick to laugh at. It’s got more than enough going on to carry the drama tag, and wears it well.

The playthrough has a good pace, which held my attention the entire time. Once the flick starts it never really slows down. There’s a cool weaving of a past and present story being told while everything unfolds. After it’s all said and done, both of the stories blended together well and made for a pretty cool flick.

Special effects looked great and the final transformation of Radcliffe’s character was killer looking. Now what I don’t understand is how everything could look so good with the special effects throughout (almost) the entire movie, then out of nowhere have one huge scene where the special effects were an epic fail. Weird, but that was the only time the special effects were lacking. Yes it’s a big scene, but luckily it passes kind of quickly and we’re back to everything looking good again.

Now, all of the cast did a good job, but I have to say Radcliffe really surprised me. I already knew he was a good actor, but this one shows us that Radcliffe has come a long way from his Harry Potter days. I’m starting to look forward to seeing what he’s going to do next. Other than that, like I said, everyone did a good job, and it was cool seeing some stars like Morse, Remar and Quinlan pop in to add to the line up. One thing that got me though was Heather Graham is pushed on the billing, but two things about that. One, her role really isn’t that big, and two… her character really wasn’t that good. Now, I don’t know if it was Graham’s acting or if that’s how the character was written. Either way, she’s done far better in other roles. Aside from being another big name in the line up, the Veronica character could have easily be done by anyone else and no one would have noticed the difference.