Lo (2009) | Teen Ink

Lo (2009)

July 24, 2010
By TheGothicGunslinger ELITE, Lakeland, Florida
TheGothicGunslinger ELITE, Lakeland, Florida
177 articles 0 photos 6 comments

Favorite Quote:
"To be great is to be misunderstood" - Ralph Waldo Emerson


From its trailer and advertisements, Lo appears to be a horror-comedy along the lines of Evil Dead or Dead Snow. These ads are completely misleading...because this film is terrible, and I mean *terrible*. The humor's juvenile and low-brow, only pleasing to the lowest common denominator, the characters are flat and uninteresting, and the concept seems more suited for a humorous video on YouTube than for a full-fledged film. Even as I write this, it's difficult to say anything good about a film that's this bad.

In the film, we follow the timid and lovelorn Justin, an "average Joe" of sorts that doesn't see too much excitement in his life. Things change dramatically, however, once the quirky April drops into Justin's life. The two soon become inseparable and, as love stories often go, everything seems right in the world because of their young love. When April's abruptly kidnapped by demons, Justin sets out to rescue April by summoning the demon Lo, who happens to have a certain agenda of his own. Hell, musical demons, and over-sized rats are all aspects that block Justin's rescue in this horror-"comedy" hybrid.

The concept sounds pretty interesting, there's no doubt about that, but the film absolutely fails in all aspects. Let's start with the humor - it's completely unfunny and entirely low-brow. Horror-comedies usually work with deadpan humor or grossout humor, but Lo contains neither of those two styles of comedy. Instead, the film sounds like it was written by an amateur stand-up comedian that, after going onstage during open-mic night, thinks he's the funniest thing in the world. I kid you not, the film relies almost entirely on sex and relationship jokes. If these were vaguely funny at all, maybe I'd be able to forgive some of the bad writing. However, because we don't live in a perfect world, the jokes aren't funny and the writing's disgustingly dreadful. It doesn't help that the jokes are written in a way that says "I'm funny and I know it", because it just adds a misguided sense of pretentiousness to this absolutely terrible movie.

The structure of the film is laughable as well. The majority of the action takes place in Justin's dark apartment room, and the film expects us to think a single conversation (along with some flashbacks) will actually make for some good storytelling. I'm not saying that I don't enjoy character interaction, but even The Seventh Seal - a film known for its long lengths of conversations - looks exciting when compared with this snoozer of a film. It's completely boring. Why? Because if I don't care about (or even just like) the characters and the humor isn't funny, then what's the point of watching a comedy?

I could go on about how juvenile this film is, but the rest of what I've written should speak for itself. With an awful sense of humor, terrible writing, and painfully dull characters, Lo is a "comedy" that proves to be completely unfunny. What's more, the film isn't even awful enough to be enjoyable in a "so-bad-it's-good" sort of way. So, in the end, the film's just "so-bad-it's-freaking-awful".


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