Indiscriminately stitched together from the carcasses of horror films past, Steven C. Miller’s spooker relocates one of the mutants from It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive to the scariest place for a nightlight-dependent preadolescent outside of the closet and pits the thing against two brothers equipped with the ingenuity one might glean from a double bill of Poltergeist and The Gate. Slickly anonymous, and with a distinctly Amblin-esque sense of nostalgia, Under the Bed extols the courage of Neal (Jonny Weston) and his younger bro, Paulie (Gattlin Griffith), as they struggle to overcome the sort of anxiety typically treated in real life with 20 milligrams of Prozac a day. Neal, back from a long sojourn in Florida after having set a fire that killed his mother, reconnects with Paulie and halfheartedly attempts a friendship with his Zach Galifanakis look-alike father’s do-gooder new wife. Except things get off to a predictably rough start when Neal’s caught fondly regarding a conveniently located chainsaw and someone needs to be blamed for the wound on Paulie’s neck that was caused by some under-bed-dwelling ghoulie with Frankenstein hands, a lion’s roar, and a Bonnie Tyler smoke machine. The idea of kids bandying together in grief in order to do battle against the hang-ups that irrationally grip them is rife with potentially poignant and penetrating implications and insights, except the phobia here is real (unseen, even at its nosiest, by the film’s adults—until the climax requires them to) and is neither rooted in Neal and Paulie’s shared trauma in having lost their mother nor in any possible abuse their father’s perpetual anger might have explored in another film whose sense of conviction and psychological nuance rose above that of the “I Learned It from Watching You” anti-drug PSA.
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