phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2022

M3GAN



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2022
Runtime: 1h 42m
Country: USA, New Zealand
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Plot Summary: A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Not nearly as crazy and campy as it thinks it is, or as advertised. It's fun enough, I guess, though it's pretty tepid, never reaching a boiling point. This is like Top 40 weird, not Weird weird. It's a horror movie for normal people.


Outside Reviews:

Katie Rife
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Like "Malignant," "M3gan" knows it's ridiculous. It fills a kiddie pool with ridiculousness and splashes around in it. Cooper's screenplay for "M3gan" is more overtly comedic than "Malignant," however, and has a more populist type of appeal as a result. (The audience at a Chicago preview of the film went crazy for it.) The themes are your classic "science gone amok" fare seen in everything from "Frankenstein" to "Jurassic Park," combined with a more modern throughline exploring anxieties about motherhood and filtered through the knowingly silly lens of the "tiny terrors" subgenre. "Child's Play" is the most famous example of that last category, and many comparisons have been and will be made between M3gan (an acronym for "Model 3 Generative ANdroid") and Chucky. Their motivations are different, however: Chucky's boy Andy was a victim of his doll as much as anyone else, while M3gan is fiercely protective of her girl, nine-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw). 


Austen Goslin
M3GAN is gleeful, unhinged fun — but it’s smarter than it looks

M3GAN, like most of the Chucky franchise or the Evil Dead movies, was designed with the principle that the best horror comedies are an exercise in audience understanding. They’re playing a game with you. These movies never let you know when it’s OK to laugh. They play their cruelest gags straight, rather than pausing for a punchline like a traditional comedy might. They throw in joke after darkly comic joke, daring viewers to laugh in spite of themselves, forcing a buildup of tension that eventually resolves in cathartic giggles at the weirdest, most uncomfortable moments — like M3GAN’s truly hilarious sequence where the killer doll sings to Cady, turning a familiar pop hit into an unexpected bedtime song.