JP Nunez
My love of music is one of the few things that can rival my love of horror, so it should come as no surprise that Art of a Hit caught my attention the minute I heard about it. It’s a horror film about a fictional rock band from the ‘90s, and as a huge fan of ‘90s alternative rock, I felt like it was made just for me. I simply had to check this movie out as soon as I could, and when I finally got my screener, I pressed play with the eager anticipation of a kid on Christmas morning.
Art of a Hit was directed and co-written by Gaelan Draper, and it stars Ryan Donowho, Charlie Saxton, Tim Jo, Rob Raco, James Earl, Allie MacDonald, and David Valdes. In the film, Ryan is the lead singer of Excelsis, a band that hit it big in the ‘90s and then quickly faded into obscurity. Now, almost a decade later, he wants to recapture his glory days, so he gets the band back together and tries to record a new album.
The old friends travel to a millennium-old French castle to work with an eccentric super producer named Charlie, but unfortunately, their comeback attempt doesn’t go the way they planned. It looks like Excelsis might never reach the top of the charts again, and even worse, Ryan starts to experience some strange, potentially supernatural phenomena. Is it just the stress of trying to make a great album, or is there really something haunting this ancient castle?
I have to be honest, I have very mixed feelings about Art of a Hit. Elements of the movie resonate with me on a deep level, but the overall experience leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s start with the good. Right from the get-go, I had a great time with every single one of these characters.
The acting is fantastic all around, so I had no trouble believing that these really were old friends getting back together to do what they love. There’s also a newbie in the group, and the personality mismatch between him and his bandmates has an odd, quirky sort of charm to it.
But hands down, the best characters in Art of a Hit are Ryan and Charlie. Ryan is played excellently by Ryan Donowho, and everything about the guy, from his mannerisms to his facial expressions, lets you know just how much this potential comeback means to him. He’s genuinely haunted by his irrelevance over the last several years, and there’s no doubt that he’ll do whatever it takes to get back in the limelight.
I’m a musician myself, so I saw a lot of myself in this character. Granted, I never really dreamed of being a famous rock star, but I know what it’s like to desperately want people to enjoy your music. It can be like a disease that eats away at you from the inside, and Ryan Donowho plays the part flawlessly.
In contrast, Charlie is about as arrogant and self-assured as they come. He doesn’t play or write music himself, but his success has definitely gone to his head. The guy is a self-styled guru who seems to think he’s above the musicians he works with, and actor Charlie Saxton is pitch-perfect in the role. He makes you want to punch the guy in the face the minute he first opens his mouth, and as Art of a Hit goes on, he doesn’t lose a step.
Those great characters make for an intriguing story, but unfortunately, the horror in that story doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain. To be fair, there are some scenes where director Gaelan Draper ramps the creepiness up to 11, and they’re super fun, but they often lead to a very disappointing climax. The film has a lot of dream sequences and fake jump scares, and as any seasoned genre veteran knows, that’s never a recipe for success.
What’s more, even when Art of a Hit goes for genuine frights, a lot of them are very generic. The best I can say about most of these scenes is that some of the gore effects are quite good, but they’re not the main attraction here. This movie is primarily a spookfest, not a gorefest, so the strong effects can’t overcome the “been there, done that” vibe a lot of the scares give off.
Last but not least, the film also features a number of creepy elements that end up going nowhere. To take just one example, there’s a room the band members are supposed to stay away from, and when one of them inevitably checks it out anyway, we learn that it holds a mysterious box that functions as a sensory deprivation chamber.
It seems like an ominous foreshadowing of what’s to come, but Art of a Hit doesn’t do anything interesting with it. At best, the role it plays in the third act could be a metaphor for Ryan’s ultimate fate, but for me, it didn’t elicit anything more than a yawn and a bored shrug.
So at the end of the day, I’m sad to say that I wouldn’t recommend Art of a Hit. Sure, the characters are fun, and if you’re a musician, you’re almost guaranteed to sympathize with Ryan’s struggles, but unfortunately, the weak horror just drags the movie down too much. It turns what could’ve been an amazing allegory for the horrors of being an artist into a bland, often by-the-numbers exercise in genre cliches, so if you’re on the prowl for something good to watch, I suggest you look elsewhere.
Art of a Hit is set to hit VOD on August 20.
