Rights issues probably stopped Blumhouse from calling its latest film “Freaky Friday the 13th” but that’s almost exactly what it is. Take the body switch conceit of Freaky Friday, mix it with the crazed killer of Friday the 13th, give it the perfect release date, and you have Freaky.
From director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day), Freaky stars Kathryn Newton (Halt and Catch Fire, Supernatural) as a high school outcast who switches bodies with a local serial killer, played by Vince Vaughn (Swingers, Wedding Crashers). That means you’ve got Vaughn playing a teenage girl, Newton playing a psycho, and the first trailer looks like the film plays that up big time. Here it is.
We think that trailer looks great but the danger here is repetition. We’ve seen so many horror movies and so many body switch comedies that while it’s novel to blend the two like this, everything here feels so familiar. There’s certainly a danger of the movie not being able to surprise us. But Landon has proved he can take a tried and true concept and elevate it enough (Happy Death Day, for example) so our hopes are high.
Freaky opens, you guessed it, on Friday, November 13.
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