GROSS DISTRACTION - Weapons - an embarrassment of genres
There's genre fluidity and then there's genre hoarding
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
WEAPONS, director ZACH CREGGER; cast JOSH BROLIN, JULIA GARNER, ALDEN EHRENREICH, AUSTIN ABRAMS, CARY CHRISTOPHER, BENEDICT WONG, AMY MADIGAN; production NEW LINE CINEMA/Subconscious, 2025, 128 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.
Yes, I still haven’t finished with The Godfather - there’s one more post about 1972’s top-grossing movie in the works - it’ll probably focus on secondary character Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo. Read parts one and two. In the meantime, here’s another ‘distraction’ piece, about Zach Cregger’s hyper-genre horror Weapons, which is actually still in cinemas, at least round my way. How’s that for topical?
Criticising genre
I steer clear of genre here. I’m suspicious of it. Not of genre movies (or genre literature and so on) but of genre as a critical resource, as a way of reading a movie. Genre is something that you note in passing - an aspect of a movie’s context - but it can’t be more than that. Sometimes, in fact, it’s helpful to totally ignore a movie’s genre, to pretend it doesn’t have one or even that it belongs to another one - just for the lols.
I do this sometimes; it gives me a of distance (an ironic distance, I suppose) on the movie I’m watching. I’m considering it not as a narrow expression of its genre but as something larger, a text that tells us something about its period or its ideological origin. I think that’s what I’ve done here, for instance, with Goldfinger. The movie’s a perfect, almost hermetic genre piece (also a trashy void, if you ask me) but if you pretend it’s not you gain access to the bigger stuff - the themes and meanings. Likewise with The Covered Wagon, a 1923 movie from the core of the already well-defined Western genre. I think you’ll find ten or a dozen other posts that take roughly this approach in GROSS: pretending a genre movie is something else in order to reveal something about it.
Criticism, especially serious or academic criticism, can exceed genre and it’s perfectly possible to do useful criticism while ignoring it completely, focusing on all the other stuff (formal, political, social, aesthetic, historic…). Adorno would presumably have classified what we now call genre as an aspect of commodification, standardisation - something about passive consumption. Whatever, I know he’d have hated it.
But, of course, in the fandoms and the subreddits there’s plenty of absolutely pure genre criticism - criticism that concerns itself almost entirely with genre compliance, with genre adequacy. This stuff can’t transcend and in fact is fully contained by genre. Consequently - I will loftily assert - it’s not really criticism.
Zach Cregger is obviously ambivalent about genre too. You can tell because Weapons, his latest horror movie, exhibits something you might call ‘genre drift’ or perhaps more accurately ‘genre switching’ or even ‘genre hoarding’. I’m not a horror expert but I’m pretty sure all the horror genres (sub-genres?) are here (also some non-horror genres). All the horror archetypes and all the horror gags too. This suggests, on the face of it, a great passion for the genre and a confident, encyclopaedic knowledge of its possibilities.
But I think we can also see, in Cregger’s scattergun genre splurge, a kind of discomfort with its rigidity - possibly even some disdain for or embarrassment about genre. I think that if I were a proper horror fan I might find Cregger’s dilettante approach - the way he roams across the genre field, casually adopting and then equally casually dropping genres, usually with switchback rapidity - even sometimes crunching two or more together in one scene - to be a little disrespectful. He’s, well, he’s taking the piss, right?
Criticising scary
Like I said, I'm not a horror native. Not strictly horror-literate. The friend I went to see Weapons with had to explain some of this stuff to me. It's because I watch horror movies like a football fan going to a cricket match. I mean I think I know the rules but what the fuck is going on here?
To state the obvious, Cregger is horror-literate. He's beyond literate: he a kind of collector or connoisseur of all these devices, archetypes, themes. They're all here, in sequence - plus the frenetic climax collapses into a kind of chaotic parody of all the genres, all at once. In this final sequence there are three or four shots that could be from a Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker zombie comedy. Or Mel Brooks if he’d got around to the undead.
The truly scary figure at the centre of this particular horror movie - the one we come to learn is making it all happen, driving all the nastiness along - is herself a self-conscious hybrid of three or four distinct archetypes; your basic horror clown with a bit of thousand year-old vampire who must have compliant human flesh plus classic basement-botherer/abducter/torturer.
Amy Madigan brings a demented Mrs Doubtfire to Aunt Gladys that you have to see. I do hope this is a kind of third-age genre reboot for Madigan and that we now get a sequence of these unhinged characters. She's brilliant.
Aunt Gladys's victims become murderous slasher/revenant types - unstoppable zombified bots under her control (via a predictably arbitrary mashup of icky methods - voodoo/folk ritual/New England witchcraft - that involves twigs and blood and hair and stuff and is pretty horrible (I looked away, I'm sorry).
Anyway, these zombies - including but not limited to the 17 missing kids - can only be properly brought down by a decent-sized SUV at speed or by multiple 9mm rounds, although by the end they've calmed down and we learn that they might be brought back to life ("some of them even learnt to talk again…" the voiceover tells us).
Also, I think once you’ve seen this you'll agree that it now doesn't really matter how many Oscars Benedict Wong wins across his career because his extraordinary berserker zombification-murder-chase-death segment - to which headbutting his sweet, pastel boyfriend to a pulp is only the prelude - is as good as it’s going to get. Sorry, Benedict.
So all the horror genres are here - plus a kind of SVU suburban child abduction element with incompetent policing, a vigilante parent who mounts a frankly ridiculous investigation (he’s obviously never seen Google Maps) and one of those kind of flakey but loveable schoolteachers you get in made-for-TV melodramas.
You'd think this wild inconsistency would undermine the thing - render it incoherent, unsatisfactory. But we let Cregger off with a warning because he seems to know what he's doing - plus his love for the form is so infectious. The script is intelligent, the switchback overlapping timelines handled elegantly, cinematography is sophisticated and there’s an optical thing happening that I don’t really understand but that gives the movie a kind of uncanny, wobbly shimmer that’s very attractive and unsettling. The cast is excellent; not a weak link (I had to Google “does Julia Garner have curly hair?” I know you already knew the answer but this is all new for me and her look seems important to the way this thing hangs together).
I had to stream Barbarian, Cregger’s 2022 AirBnB shocker, to confirm that there’s a pattern here. Even on the smaller canvas of your basic basement-confinement-terror storyline, he’s able to suggest multiple genres and there are plenty of solid gags about horror conventions (even after we’ve gone through what must be the last door in a long sequence of terrible doors there is always another door).
Horror movies are hot right now, as you’ve probably noticed. Horror directors are among the biggest names in the industry. Specialist studios/distributors are thriving and getting meetings even in the most exalted places. Across the history of Hollywood they’ve always made some contribution to the box office records, but have rarely topped the charts. In the 60 years of movies considered here so far we’ve had Frankenstein but that’s about it.