10 Terrible Scenes From Awesome Recent Movies
4. The Cops Arrive - Strange Darling
JT Mollner's Strange Darling is one of the year's most buzzed-about horror movies, and for damn good reason, revolving around a cat-and-mouse game between a cop, credited only as "The Demon" (Kyle Gallner) and an infamous serial killer known as The Electric Lady (Willa Fitzgerald).
Some 20 minutes before the end of the movie, Mollner pulls the rug out by having the Lady kill the Demon, biting his neck and causing him to bleed to death. Given that the Demon has already called for backup, however, two cops soon enough arrive, forcing the Lady to re-stage the scene to make herself look like the victim.
What follows is an embarrassingly on-the-nose scene in which the female cop, Gale (Madisen Beaty), immediately believes the Lady's ruse while the male cop, Pete (Steven Michael Quezada), is decidedly more skeptical.
The two cops begin arguing, with Gale protesting that Pete won't listen to her because she, and we quote, "has a vagina."
Even forgiving how lacking in subtlety the exchange is, considering the subject matter and how Gale actually is wrong in this instance, it feels like a strangely off-key attempt to make light of the #MeToo movement, capped by Pete calling her a "dumb b*tch" in the next scene.
There's nothing wrong with a horror movie about a female villain who preys on society's preconceptions of who is and isn't dangerous, but the whole cartoonish sequence with the cops feels like it was written by a decidedly less-nuanced writer with some rather sketchy ideas about modern feminism.