Grimcutty is a pretty bad and unintentionally laughable Hulu original horror flick… but it’s got a certain something that rings my bell. It’s a flick about creepypasta/urban legends/internet folklore which I find interesting, even fascinating. This is hardly the first movie to work this subgenre but it is one of the few that understands it.

The flick is about an internet meme/challenge – Grimcutty, a demonic thingamabob who appears to teens and makes them cut themselves (or stab their moms). This creature is stalking our protagonist, a not-at-all-annoying AMSR youtuber. Can she escape the creature before it gets her and her friends?

Yeah, this movie is pretty much just not scary, nor does it generate the mood o’ doom it thinks it does. It’s baddie – Grimcutty – is meant to be creepy in a wide-grinning visage sort of way… but honestly every time he shows up, I laughed. It’s a top-heavy looking creature with skinny legs, dressed in black that, from a distance, looks like a particularly happy version of Gru (from Despicable Me, not Zork). He looks goofy, he moves sluggishly, and his knife attacks could be walked away from they are so slow.

So the core baddie of the film doesn’t work but, since he’s an internet meme/urban legend, at least there’s something intellectually interesting going on here. Minor spoiler here – the creature shows up when the parents of the teenagers get panicky about what their kids are doing online. Its not the kids summoning up a ghoulie out of boredom, it’s the well-meaning but meddling parents who inadvertently summon the creature.

This is interesting because I’ve always felt that the internet challenges that are particularly headline-worthy exceed the actual problem. By which I mean, there were far more hysterical adults and news reports about kids licking ice cream than there probably were kids actually licking ice cream. And the hysteria probably inspired more kids to lick ice cream. Or eat Tide pods or do whatever that caused finger tutting on cable news channels.

That’s enough of a cool idea that I gave the movie an extra credit for actually having insight on internet and teen culture. Movie still stinks though. Take the good idea and insert it into actually a good movie and they’d have something.

Score: 62