You're Next: 27 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

Home invasions movies stormed the cinema for a brief spell.  It seemed the more explicit the torture the more money the films could make.  The problem is that they were all basically the same movie.  Family, or couple, is tormented by masked and unknown assailants for no apparent reason other than the glee of killing and chaos and have to fight tooth and nail to survive in their own home.  Sound familiar?  So what happens when you turn that prospect upside down and make one of the survivors, a survival expert? You get, You're Next.

The film is about a delightfully screwed up rich family gathering at a large estate somewhere in some rural area to celebrate the Mother and Father's 35th Anniversary.  The first 20 minutes gets the exposition out of the way, introducing the tension between siblings, the mother's life of medication, as well as the wives/girlfriends/boyfriends of the siblings.  Then in the midst of a fight at dinner Tariq (Ti West), boyfriend of sister Aimee (Amy Seimetz), notices something out the window, goes to investigate and gets a cross bolt in the head.  As you may guess all hell breaks loose from there and the rest of the film is about survival as family members are picked off left and right by three men clad in black tactical gear and creepy animal masks.

The delightful twist in this story is that middle child Crispian's (AJ Bowen) girlfriend Erin, played by Sharni Vinson seems to have a knack for what to do in a crisis situation, which we learn later has to do with her being raised on a survivalist commune by her dad until she was 15, in the Australian outback.  Bad luck for the killers, who she seems to thwart by every, and I mean EVERY, means necessary, including a meat tenderizing mallet, a blender, screw driver, axe... You get where I'm going with there.  There's a lot of carnage in this movie and the pacing is damn near perfect.

I'm not generally a fan of movies like this.  I hated The Strangers and most of the films that came out in that era.  You're Next, however, has a very dark sense of humor that I seemed to get.  Who doesn't have that family member that drives you up the wall so much that you almost wish they would get stabbed a dozen times by various screwdrivers and knives?  While certain aspects of the movie were a bit cheesy and a bit unbelievable, it was refreshing to see three masked killers, who look like cinematic badasses, continuously get set back by a tough as nails Australian girl.

4 out of 5 skulls.