Somewhere at the bottom of your netflix cue is probably a little movie starring Daniel Radcliffe and Max Minghella called Horns. I’m gonna tell you if you should move that up to the front of your cue and watch it this weekend. Oh and I promise absolutely no spoilers with this one. Enjoy!

Wikipedia describes Horns as an American dark fantasy horror film and I’m not sure I completely agree with that. I’d call it a dark spiritual crime drama? Truth is, it’s a hot mess. Not necessarily and mess though. When you think the movie is going in one direction it quickly turns a corner and goes in another.

The film is loosely based on Joe Hill’s novel Horns and directed by Alexandre Aja. I never read Horns so I don’t have anything to compare it too and honestly I don’t have any movie to compare this too either. Hollywood pitches are notorious for combining movies together to give an example of what the movie is going to be like. So maybe this is Black Dahlia and Fantastic Four meets The Seventh Sign and Stand By Me? It’s a weird movie.

Here’s the premise, Daniel Radcliffe stars as Ig, who becomes the prime suspect when his girlfriend Merrin is raped and murdered. Despite his declarations of innocence, he is shunned by the community, and only his childhood friend and lawyer Lee seems to believe him. He hides away from the press by staying with his parents and brother Terry.

After drinking heavily Ig wakes up the day after a vigil for Merrin with a pair of horns protruding from his head. The horns make people tell Ig their darkest secrets and desires. Some hilarity ensues but it’s more of an entertaining chuckle than a full on laugh out loud kind of thing.

Ig starts to use the power of the horns to prove his innocence by getting people to tell him the truth. He gains additional powers like being able to touch someone’s skin and see what they saw and the ability to attract every snake in the town. I don’t know if you’d call that a power but it helps move the story along.

And that’s about as far as I’m going to go into explaining the storyline because from their the crazy train that is this movie really jumps the third rail and goes from being a lighthearted whodunit to a weirdly spiritual pseudo religious bible belt movie. And I got it and I liked it but I think if Alexandre Aja had pushed it any further I would have felt I’d been tricked into watching a Christian based movie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just that I like knowing what I’m getting myself into before hand.

I think someone who’s a little more into religion will like the ending better and someone who’s really outside of religion or even offended by it should probably stay away from this movie.

Overall I liked this movie. I think the acting was excellent. There are a lot of really great cameos and Radcliffe and Minghella do a great job. It’s just not a movie for everyone and I think that’s probably why it’s not at the top of your Netflix list.

I know I give a lot of B+ in my reviews but to me a B is average and so many things that I watch tend to be slightly above average. If I gave everything an A rating then it wouldn’t mean anything when I said you absolutely must see a film or something like that.

So Horns B+. If you’re home and it’s a rainy day and you’ve got some time to kill, watch it. It’s good.