On the surface, Bodies Bodies Bodies could’ve squandered its premise with poor execution, but it has a lot of smarts and it has a killer cast (no pun intended) to hold it together with a lot of twists that keep us invested.
The movie centers around a group of friends who gather for a hurricane party which is just like it sounds. They’re having fun during the middle of a massive storm until they get the idea to play a game called Bodies Bodies Bodies which involves the friends guessing who committed a fake murder among them.
The game first goes off without a hitch until one of their own disappears and is found dead. They try to deduce each other as the culprit. Then things go from bad to worse as the power is knocked out.
Each person begins to question the motives of who did the murder and it escalates, as does the storm.
Bodies Bodies Bodies creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense to hold its plot together and the results are not entirely murky. Each character provides intelligent if not overblown rationality as to why they think the others are guilty. The audience would need a Venn diagram to establish each person and their motives.
The movie loses a bit of its brains leading up to its climax, but before that, it proves to be smart and occasionally darkly funny.
Who is the killer? I’m not even sure I still know or understand why, but I do know that it’s an elusive, harrowing maze to get through and by the end, I was satiated by its nerve to give us an anticlimax that works well.
The premise of Bodies Bodies Bodies serves as an antidote to the construction of most horror movies and that’s what makes it succeed.
Grade: B+
(Rated R for violence, bloody images, drug use, sexual references and pervasive language.)
