I saw this movie titled “F,” and wondered how this title translates into a horror movie. So I put it on not knowing anything about it. After watching the opening scene, it should have been clear to me why this movie is named “F,” but sometimes I am just a bit slow. It wasn’t until about half way through that the light bulb turned on, and I said, “Oh, F. I get it.” The F stands for a failing grade, so the question is: what grade will HorrO give this movie?
The story opens in a classroom, where Robert, a teacher, is passing back some papers. As he does this, he talks to the class about their performance. He stops at one student, and gives him a paper with a big “F” on it (yes, I somehow missed that). Robert then proceeds to belittle the student in front of the rest of the class. The student obviously upset and embarrassed, walks up to his teacher, and punches him in the face before leaving the classroom. Robert is forced to take a leave of absence before returning to work. Since the incident, Robert has struggled with life in and out of the classroom, but that is nothing compared to what happens after this particular school day.
Robert’s job isn’t made any easier due to the fact that one of his students is his daughter, Kate. She purposely ignores him in class, so he gives her after school detention. It is here that their real issues come to a boiling point. In the heat of an argument, he slaps her before she runs off. Apparently he does a good job at getting his students to run out of his classroom. As he walks down a hall to find her, someone throws a milkshake at the window. This scares him, but not as much as the message that is written on the window.
Here is where my problems with the movie begin. It turns out the school is being attacked by monkeys dressed as humans. Yes, that it right, monkeys dressed as humans. There are several assailants that are very skilled at jumping, and climbing over everything. One of them scales a bookshelf in the school library with easy. They don’t knock over a book, or make a sound. I have seen enough bookshelves to know that is highly unlikely. They continue to climb things over the course of the movie in order to sneak up, and attack people. Doing this once is all right, but continuously climbing on top of things, and dropping down from ceilings becomes ridiculous.
Another problem with the assailants is that the audience learns little about them. Besides having excellent climbing skills, they are all dressed the same way: pants, sneakers, and a hooded sweater with the hood pulled over their heads. Their faces are never shown because they also have an incredible talent at staying in the dark. They are there to kill, and that is about all the audience knows. The audience is left to assume the attacks have something to do with Robert giving that student an F, or that the assailants have something against the school. The lack of details leaves me to believe it is possible that they were in fact monkeys dressed as humans.
As far as the death scenes, they are pretty weak because the movie repeatedly cuts away before anything happens to the victim. There is one time these monkeys corner a girl and just as they close in on her, she screams, and they cut away. They do eventually show the aftermath of what happens to her, which is not bad after seeing it, but I would rather see how they did that. They do the same thing with one of the security guards. He is cornered, starts crying, and they cut away just as the assailants come at him. There has to be something more than just showing people once they are already dead. It takes all the fun out of it.
The final thing that I am going to complain about is the time that the madness begins. When the after school scenes start, it is about 6:30pm, and already dark outside. I don’t know, is it typical for detention to start so late? I remember detention starting not long after school ended. This confused me, which is not hard to do as you see. I thought maybe it is a boarding school, but there are only a few students still around. There is this security office with officers supposedly watching video cameras all over campus, so I thought maybe there were dorms where the other students went. It turns out they actually leave the school. So what student stays so late at school that it is dark outside? Why does one girl, with barely any clothes on, start using the gym at that time? Hell, why are there still teachers around? Go home already!
Since Robert gets an F as a parent and teacher, it is time for HorrO to pass out some grades. The first F goes to the killer monkeys. All right, all right, they aren’t really monkeys. They still get an F because the audience learns little about them except that there is nothing in the school that they can’t climb. As far as the death scenes, they get an F because they show more screaming than killing. The timing also gets an F until someone tells me that it is typical to have students stay at school into the night. This wasn’t night school. While I am passing out F’s all around, I’ll throw out a bonus F for dialogue because I got tired of hearing Robert say, “I need to find my daughter.” Oh, and I almost forgot to give an F to the pathetic ending of the movie. All those F’s translate into a merciful 1.5 pools of blood in HorrO’s class. Class dismissed!
HorrO
