Indeed the last time director Smith worked with Malone the actress gave one of my favorite performances of hers with The Ruins, the 2017 nightmare-travelogue movie that saw a bunch of Americans abroad stumbling stupidly into a cursed pile of vines. In Swallowed, Jena Malone is playing a character named “Alice,” which seems to me an indication that the filmmakers were plenty aware of the mortifying rabbit holes this actress tends to doom-suck everybody near her down into. Swallowed has its characters not only going to a second location to meet Jena Malone, but then to a third and finally a fourth one as well! And yes by that point we’re firmly in the “abandon all hope ye who enter here” territory-no destruction has ever felt so firmly assured since Brad Pitt thought hiding in a closet in a Coens Brothers movie was an excellent idea. The latest fright flick to put this Malone theory of mine to the test, and to come down with a mean case of the positives in so doing, is Carter Smith’s squirm-inducing new queer creep-a-thon Swallowed, which just screened at Fantasia. And that was just the beginning! How many lives would have been spared if we’d all been given this simple small little bit of behavioral guidance sooner? Literally hundreds, if not thousands-this blood’s on you, Randy. Think of that poor adorable dork-king Donnie Darko, his selfhood squeezed through a wormhole of Jena Malone’s making, and weep. But Randy, bless his patchy lil’ goatee hairs, forgot the most important rule of all horror movies when he laid out said horror movie rules-you never, and I mean not ever, go to a second location with Jena Malone. I believe, for example, that the words “tits” and “legits” are rhymed at one point. In Wes Craven’s meta-slasher classic Scream the video-store nerd Randy lays out a list of horror movie rules that everybody should know lest they find themselves living in something resembling a horror film.
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