Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'She Never Died' (2019)

I REALLY wanted to like this movie. It's from the same writer/director as He Never Died (2015), which was fucking epic. It even had some really solid plot ideas. I don't know who fucked this up, but they fucked it up BAD. Maybe they needed Jason Krawczyk to direct, or maybe Jason was never a good writer and Henry Rollins really did clean up He Never Died (2015).

GOOD LORD what a great plot gone bad. This movie was nigh directionless. They had the right idea but just didn't do a damn thing with it. Lacey, our protagonist, is like Kain from He Never Died. She's some kind of vampire. In this case, rather than blood, she needs marrow. Not a lot, but about the amount she can get out of a person's fingers. For some reason, which is never fully developed, she only eats the marrow of men, and has a particular way of choosing them. In the beginning, she's after "the man with the rings" and this kicks off the plot. You see, "the man with the rings" runs a human trafficking ring with his sister for the purpose of stocking fabled Red Rooms (snuff films). During this, Lacey bumps into Detective Godfrey with the local PD who's been trying to get enough evidence to shut the ring down. The Detective decides, rather than fight endless red tape to shut the ring down, have Lacey eat the traffickers.

Doesn't that sound like a fantastic plot? Doesn't that sound like the sort of movie you'd want to watch? A washed-up cop leads a vampire to eat a bunch of human traffickers? Well, too fucking bad, that ain't the movie you're getting. And I can't, for the fucking life of me, understand why not? That would have been fantastic! A movie about a detective cleaning up the streets by feeding bad guys to Lacey. It could have done so much more, been so much more than He Never Died.

But they take that fantastic story ark and go abso-fucking-lutely, no-fucking-where with it.

The acting was also pretty good. Arguably better than He Never Died, but the dialog was atrocious. I have no fucking clue what happened there. The Dialog in He Never Died was fantastic. This time it always felt awkward and out of place, regardless of what was even being said. Sometimes what was said didn't even make any fucking sense, which might or might not have something to do with the plot, but there was no way to fucking know because of how little what happens in the plot made sense.

I can't recommend this movie. Front to back, the whole thing was a disappointment.

~

SPOILERS!!!

There were a ton of moments in this movie that didn't make sense, like when Lacey decides to just go with "the man with the rings" rather than eat him, or why Detective Godfrey doesn't just call down the cops and raid the human trafficking ring when he finally has an excuse to enter. But none of this compares to why Lacey doesn't just eat "the man with the rings" in the beginning of the movie, or how or why she does or doesn't eat.

At the beginning of the fucking movie, she's literally camping outside the human trafficking ring to eat "the man with the rings." She then breaks into their stronghold, supposedly to eat him, then just doesn't. No reason. He's there. She could easily find him. But instead, she eats some random guy. There's also this armed gangster who is with that random guy but does nothing, and she also doesn't eat for no reason. THEN she just leaves, for no fucking reason, without eating "the guy with the rings," the fucking guy she's there to eat, to begin with, AGAIN, FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

The whole fucking thing comes off as forced and weird. And this is by no means, the only time they force the plot, dragging it kicking and screaming, in all kinds of pointless and weird directions away from the initial plot arch.

I just can't find anything good to like about this movie other than the concept. I have to say, give it a pass.