There is a lot of controversy surrounding “Smiley,” a 2012 horror film written and directed by a man named Michael Gallagher. I don’t know much about Gallagher and don’t want to know anything. The same goes for the various online groups who allegedly took offense over the content of his film, although some say the accusations against them are exaggerated. Either way, no one deserves to be harassed or in any way harmed for making this movie.
I still believe this movie deserves zero stars out of four.
It had one promising element — its titular monster was brilliantly grotesque, one with its eyes stitched shut and a mouth carved into the bottom of its face, while lacking a nose or any other features. It would give anyone nightmares and is the one scary thing in “Smiley” — but the memorable baddie barely appears until the very last scene. It is fair to say that Gallagher totally squanders it.
Instead he creates a movie of shocking badness. The plot is borderline incomprehensible and boring, so it isn’t worth summarizing. Only the substandard filmmaking alone keeps you engaged, and that is so you can compile a list of grievances:
- The dialogue is written by a person completely out of touch with how young people speak. It’s strange, because Gallagher was in his 20s when he made the movie, yet his characters talk the way you suspect a middle-aged man believes all the “tech obsessed” millennials speak.
- The opening kill is one of the worst I’ve ever seen for three reasons: (1) It contains a completely unimportant character who exists only so the director can ogle her backside, (2) The monster it reveals looks only vaguely like the one promised in the poster and (3) It winds up poking a big hole in the ending. I’m not going to elaborate on that plot hole, or any other, because to hell with this movie. There are too many to count and it’s not worth it.
- Once the movie proper gets started, we are introduced to the worst kinds of stock characters. The protagonist is meant to represent the totally innocent, pure, virginal survivor girl, and is annoying in her naivete. Everyone else is an obnoxious college student stereotype — hedonistic, privileged, pretentious, mean-spirited, bullying and boorish. Some of them are played by YouTube celebrities of the time, but I’m not listing them because I don’t care. Hell, I’m doing them a favor. I wouldn’t want people to know it if I was in something like this.
- “Nobody knows if it’s real. It’s the internet.” That line from one of the characters sums up this movie’s knowledge of the online world. Gallagher seems to view the internet as some exotic fantasy land, far removed from human understanding. Again, how was he born in 1988?
- As mentioned earlier, the actual Smiley character only appears for a brief scene at the end of the film (not counting dream sequences, which I dismiss more often than not as pointless padding). Most of the movie uses a series of fake Smileys (for the dumbest of plot twists) that aren’t scary at all. They wear obvious latex masks, made all the more fake-looking by their stripes and bad stitching. Was there a budget issue and they could only afford the scary version of the character for a few minutes of screen time?
- There is a disturbing subplot in which one character is bullied for reporting pedophiles because the other people think it’s funny. On several occasions, an undergraduate is blatantly hit on by her professor, once again played for laughs or to seem “hip.” A separate hipster keeps trying to get the protagonist intoxicated so he can rape her. Seriously, what the fuck, movie?
- One character is mentally ill (bipolar), is weening off of lithium and gets a prescription for Ativan. Other characters assume they just have a right to her drugs. Again, what the fuck, movie?
- There are half-baked philosophical conversations with a professor played by Roger Bart that are insulting. This movie, like the characters in it, has a very high opinion of its own intellectual calibre, but doesn’t actually know what it’s talking about.
- And that ending… Listen, groups like 4chan and Anonymous are correct that Gallagher doesn’t understand them. But being offended about it is a waste of time. This movie insults them in the same way that a 3rd grader insults a nerd by drawing a stick figure on the back of a napkin. It only makes itself look stupid and childish. Why care?
That’s all I need to say about “Smiley.” I once wrote that “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” would play in a loop in my personal heaven. Well, my personal hell would involve watching this movie on repeat. It is wretched, squandering a potentially iconic character with incompetent execution. Just add a bottomless bowl of olives (my least favorite food) and the personal agony would be complete.