Velvet Buzzsaw

Watch Movies TV -***DISCLAIMER*** The following review is entirely my opinion. If you comment (which I encourage you to do) be respectful. If you don't agree with my opinion (or other commenters), that's fine. To each their own. These reviews are not meant to be statements of facts or endorsements, I am just sharing my opinions and my perspective when watching the film and is not meant to reflect how these films should be viewed. Finally, the reviews are given on a scale of 0-5. 0, of course, being unwatchable. 1, being terrible. 2, being not great. 3, being okay. 4, being great and 5, being epic! And if you enjoy these reviews feel free to share them and follow the blog or follow me on Twitter (@RevRonster) for links to my reviews and the occasional live-Tweet session of the movie I'm watching! I'd say that Velvet Buzzsaw sounds like a great band name but that is exactly what it is in this film.

Velvet Buzzsaw – 1 out of 5

Netflix can sure churn out the originals.  Every month it seems like an unbearable load of new shows and movies are produced by the company and, even if you are interested in what they got, there’s almost no time to watch any of them (I still haven’t gotten around to watching the new season of Stranger Things).  I was kinda intrigued when I first heard about Velvet Buzzsaw because it is not every day that there is a horror/thriller made that is about the art community.  That being said, I only now got around to checking it out after it was released at the beginning of the year.  Sadly, like so many Netflix original movies I've watched, I actually could have kept waiting with this one.

John Malkovich is in this film...I don't know why because his character felt
incredibly superfluous and pointless.

Josephina (Zawe Ashton) works at the Haze Gallery, an art gallery owned by Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo)—she was also a member of the rock band Velvet Buzzsaw (oh, that’s where the title comes from).  Josephina ends up starting a relationship with art critic Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is, surprisingly, not an evil wizard in the world of Harry Potter.  One day, Josephina finds a deceased man in her apartment building and apparently he was quite the artist himself.  She steals the art and Rhodora desires to put them up in her gallery.  The exhibit becomes a huge success but there is darkness surrounding the painting as people connected to the art start to die in mysterious and horrific ways.

See the "Confusion" in the background?  That is a subtle foreshadowing of
the feeling you'll have after watching this.  Not confused over the story but confused
as to why this was made in the first place.

I really didn’t like this movie.  I will admit that I found a majority of the performances to be decent but the overall experience was just mind-numbing.  While not wholly awful and not a movie that I would say was aggravating to get through, I just found the feature to be tedious at best.  Believe it or not, the laughable concept of “killer art” might have worked but the product that was delivered felt, in a word, generic—which is a weird descriptive because having horror films that center around the art community isn’t a normal thing or something that would have a name brand for there to be a generic version of.

Are those shadows aliens?  In this movie it wouldn't surprise me.

The first thing that struck me about the film is how cheap it looked.  There is a blandness delivered with the camerawork, the editing, lighting and the score.  The whole product feels very “by-the-numbers” and the entire thing reminded me of a forgettable episode of a random horror anthology television series--and that even fits with the odd story.  This ended up robbing the movie of atmosphere and tone as the whole thing came off very flat, lifeless and without dimension.  You’re already struggling uphill with a horror film about haunted paintings and to give the appearance of a phoned-in approach with crafting atmosphere through the technical work only makes that hill steeper.

Maybe if I watched the film with the "art appreciate face" I would have
enjoyed this one more--no, who am I kidding?  This one stunk.

I will concede that this film did do one of its art-based kills terrifically and used it to fantastically play off of the idea of how easily art can be both misconstrued and how quickly those wanting something to be art to be labeled as so.  Beyond that, I had a very hard time taking the art-killings seriously.  The moment you have a painting of a bunch of monkeys start beating a man to death it’s kinda hard to not laugh at the rest of the product.

Did you think I was joking when I said a painting of monkeys killed a guy?

I definitely admire what Velvet Buzzsaw was going for because trying to make a horror film about art that is filled with commentary about how we both consume art and critique it is no easy task.  However, I feel the end product felt rushed and slapped together.  Beyond the overwhelming appearance of it coming off looking cheap and having kills that were hard not to find silly, the characters lack adequate development and the story often feels aimless as the central conflict of the “haunted paintings” never feels that strongly explored.  I won’t rule out that a product like this could work but, in the case of Velvet Buzzsaw, I just didn’t see this particular one that effective.