Grafted is a solid first half of a mean girls horror film until it takes a left turn into territory that, conceptually makes sense, but doesn’t really work in other ways. It’s disappointing since I loved the first half as a character study and melodrama quite a bit.

The flick is about a new girl in town who wants to continue her father’s work on skin grafting due to her own damaged face. She gets involved with the queen bees and her lecherous bio professor before things spiral out of control… in a squelchy, skin melty kind of way.

The problem with the flick was one of motivation, decision making, and logic. I just stopped caring or even really understanding why the main character wound up doing the icky things she did. The first move made sense and I guess there was an ongoing theme of beauty, but at some point it just stopped making sense. Plus given all the other things she did, why she didn’t silence that chihuahua didn’t make sense either (and, yes, I’m advocating for dog murder, apparently…).

I also had some face blindness issues but that’s more of a my brain thing that most folk won’t have. Too many unknown actors for a movie with some of the themes it has.

The film does have a nice gross side to it with a lot of fleshy bits and bloody meat. But it also thought more highly of what they pulled off than it really earned. A+ for squelchy sound effects though.

In the long run, this is a fine movie but I got to my rating as an average of what I thought of the first half vs. the second. I wanted to love it, but it needed work on the script to get it there.

Score: 78