Film Review — "Scalper"
When I hit play, I didn’t know that Scalper was a sequel to the filmmaker’s 2021 slasher film Night Caller, which I have not seen. I realized about ten minutes in, during an exposition-dump where a clairvoyant who survived Night Caller recounts the events of that film on a right-wing radio program. The unchecked opinions of the show’s smarmy host—as well as comments made by other characters throughout the movie—had me rolling my eyes and questioning whether or not director Chad Ferrin was actually using his characters as mouthpieces for a personal right-of-center outlook.
This scene follows a cold open in which the first victim utters the f-slur moments before being brutalized and murdered. I initially had no problem with the use of the word because it immediately read to me as a set-up for comeuppance: character expresses prejudice, then said character dies horribly—narrative consequences, if you will. The rest of the movie, however, had me wondering if I’d given the filmmaker too much credit. The same sort of consequences do not befall every character with troubling beliefs. And when it does happen, it’s probably just because this is a slasher film that needs bodies to hit the floor, plain and simple.
The kills, which range from solid to tasteless, are alright. Seeing a face get peeled off will always be cool, and I’ll never bemoan a good beheading, but a poorly directed scene in which a victim is sodomy-stabbed repeatedly with a knife made my brow furrow. My dissatisfaction had nothing to do with the act; the scene is just badly done. The victim suffers dozens of knife-blows to the anus, yet remarkably little blood is spilled—zero fluids puddle on the ground and hardly any stain his backside. (Nearly all the bloodshed comes from the killer’s signature scalping.) In fact, when the knife exits the guy’s rear for the final time, there’s more feces on the blade than blood, as a cheap gross-out gag.
Scalper’s effort to be both horrific and absurd makes sense because trying to have it both ways seems to be Ferrin’s modus operandi. Much like the above-mentioned right-wing radio grifter—and many real-life “drill, baby, drill” libertarian-conservatives in media—the film seeks cheers from those who share its worldview, but for those who disagree, it’s merely a dirty lark, not to be taken seriously. In other words, it wants to vindicate its political compatriots and troll its naysayers… I’d be more forgiving of it all if the film had been made well. Scalper desperately wants to be a sleazy giallo, but it lacks flair. And forget about style! It aims for psycho-sexual provocativeness, but it lands on ho-hum run-of-the-mill misogyny and transphobia instead, without demonstrating a modicum of visual prowess or intrigue.
