The GOAT meets regular old goats – well, quasi-Satanic regular old goats, anyway – in Him (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a nasty slab of satirical horror about football and false idols. Tyriq Withers (the I Know What You Did Last Summer remake) and Marlon Wayans star in the directorial debut of Justin Tipping, who co-writes with Zack Akers and Skip Bronkle, who apparently had A) a bevy of ideas for provocative visuals, and B) almost as many things to say about the culture of worship surrounding American sports stars. The film arrives as the term “elevated horror” has transitioned from praise to pejorative, so it better be EXTRA thoughtful and coherent, right? Well. About that.
The Gist: We meet Cam Cade as a wee lad, watching his favorite football team, the San Antonio Saviors, win a championship on TV. And they didn’t just win, their star quarterback, Isaiah White, suffered a gruesome compound fracture on the final play, the game-winning touchdown – and Cam’s father sees the blood, bone and triumph on display as a teaching moment: “That’s what real men do. We make sacrifices. No guts, no glory.” Years pass. That lesson stuck with Cam (Withers) all through his college career, fueling his success even after his father passed away. Cam’s ready to go pro now, and he’d like nothing more than to quarterback the Saviors to further glory.
One night Cam’s out on a practice field chucking footballs when a strange figure in a goat costume sneaks up behind him and clobbers him. Cam’s concussed. Staples in his head. Vacant stares into the middle distance. Doctors warning him that another blow to the head could cause permanent brain damage. All that. It’s terrible timing – he has to go to the combine, where players hoping to get drafted are microscopically examined by coaches and scouts. They have to lift weights and run and pass, and they’re measured and poked and prodded like cattle. Still not close to being healed, Cam attends anyway, but experiences bizarre hallucinations and backs out of the drills. Meanwhile, Isaiah White (Wayans) has had a miraculous career, racking up eight championships. He’s the GOAT. He’s also aging out. Last year of his contract. Retirement looms. Could the Saviors be searching for his replacement?
Isaiah offers Cam a potential inside track to the position, inviting the kid to train for a week at his compound, which is so deep in the desert, you have to pass Area 51, gas up at Asteroid City and take a left toin at Albuquerque to get there. Of course Cam accepts. The vet wants to know if the rookie has the stuff. What it takes. Enough of the infamous IT to fill his gilded cleats. The place is wild – skins, skulls, art, an indoor football field, hyperbaric chambers, ice baths, saunas, film rooms, an army of enablers and a variety of monuments to Isaiah MFin’ White. Isaiah’s doctor puts needles in Cam, and Isaiah’s wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), suggests he put something else in him, namely, the male version of a jade vagina egg. Cam runs til he pukes and passes out in the middle of the sun-baked scrub desert, which is this movie’s version of getting a hangnail. Cam participates in a drill where his failures result in another man getting blasted in the face with a football shot out of a Jugs machine until he’s disfigured, which is this movie’s version of stubbing your toe. Suffice to say, things get increasingly f—ed as Cam pursues his dream. Oh, and the hallucinations still haven’t subsided.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The film is from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, so there’s inevitably a point where you just want Cam to, you know, Get Out. Saltburn, Weapons and Ari Aster stuff like Hereditary and Midsommar come to mind, as does Oliver Stone’s ridiculous football movie Any Given Sunday and the shoulda-been-better Will Smith football drama Concussion.
Performance Worth Watching: Fox leaves a distinctive impression in limited screen time, playing a frenzied maniac who hovers ever so slightly above all the other frenzied maniacs.
Memorable Dialogue: “Put it in your butthole, Cam.” – Elsie
Sex and Skin: A hallucinatory sequence featuring lady strippers.
Our Take: As soon as you hear the phrase “San Antonio Saviors” – about two minutes into the film – it becomes clear that Him is not going to be particularly subtle. It’s a wildly overstated satire that flirts with allegory, Cuisinarting together religious imagery and football idolatry, spending a little over 90 minutes to convey a simplistic message about the American pro-sports industrial complex: It’s toxic! Players develop god complexes before they’re discarded and replaced, obscenely rich White men pull the strings, maniacal followers form cults, and such a description isn’t much of an exaggeration. But the film constructs a fugue-like display of grotesque imagery to illustrate what’s already obviously Not Very Nice about the National Football League, and it’s akin to the most obnoxious TV-sports bloviator shouting the same things an inch from your face over and over again.
Him begins its siege with commentary on the twisted logic of overcoming injury to continue playing: “As his doctor, I can’t say it’s safe for him to play football,” comments Cam’s physician after he’s attacked. His reply is “As a fan?”, which indicts the portion of the audience that lauds their favorite players on their favorite team for being a “warrior” and playing through the pain and, oh by the way, potentially stunting their life span. (Speaking as a football fan who accepts the cognitive dissonance of a beloved pastime that glorifies brutality, I feel seen – in a rather uncomfortable way.) From there, Tipping piles on the nasty situations and stomach-churning imagery in a manner that plays like a vaguely incoherent grab-bag of derangement: Occult inferences, the association of “alternative medicine” with vampirism (Tom Brady’s TB12 brand and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop aren’t directly referenced, although they haunt the film a bit), the troubling psychology of Football Dads, and plenty of guns, drugs, sex and horror-movie violence.
If Tipping’s thematics aren’t exactly delicate, at least the film’s overall visual palette is creative and stimulating. Some might say overstimulating. Nevertheless, the director nurtures enough eerie, unsettling atmospherics within Isaiah’s bunker to render Him a stylegasm, empty as it may be. (That buildup to and reveal of a hammer-to-noggin reference of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper? It felt like the last straw for my patience, which to that point had been tested by far too much look-at-me visual indulgence.) The biggest issue is Cam himself, whose inner life is cobbled together out of sketchy cliches and never offers us an emotional handhold, neutering the final scenes’ attempts at catharsis. The film doesn’t bother to explore or interrogate his dreams, fears and motives, leaving us with provocation for its own sake.
Our Call: The spot. The hold. The kick! Doink. Off the upright. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.