Monday, April 18, 2016

Starry Eyes (2014)

The egregiously cynical agenda behind "Starry Eyes" was to clearly paint a very grim and hateful (and more or less truthful depending on who you ask...) portrait of Hollywood and the ghoulish, devil-worshipping film producers that undoubtedly inhabit it, while appropriately dressing it up with some moderately effective 'body horror' and slasher elements.

An aspiring actress gets called in to an audition for a horror movie and is coldly dismissed by the casting directors. Her coping mechanism for rejection is to have a self-harming meltdown in a restroom stall, which, unbeknownst to her, is overheard by one on of the film's casting representatives. They take an interest in her candid displays and call her back for another audition - this time involving nude photography. When she is then invited to meet up with the producer who turns out to be a grinning, Satanic perv, shit takes an even darker turn as she has to figure out how far she's willing to go or how much she's willing to suffer for starring role...

Several shifts in tone occur around the last act - transitioning the film from a sort of "Rosemary's Baby"-like premise involving the occult setting its sights on a vulnerable young woman, to an almost Brundlefly-type of breakdown of her body (brought on by sucking some bad dick, no less...), to some gory kills and concluding on a strangely 'artsy' symbolic note. Again, it's all geared in a very sardonic way of bashing Tinsel Town and how your dreams of "making it" could potentially rot away who you are and leave you a Teflon-coated shell of malice. For me, it all came together alright, for the most part. I liked the enmity and bleakness of it's rooted message and the lead performance was notably strong. And, as mentioned, there's a few nicely gory death scenes and some suitable FX work at times. Not the most memorable flick ever, but  not too bad.