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Caught GET OUT (2017) the other day, and enjoyed it. It’s not the Oscar-worthy movie that some of its boosters have claimed it to be, but it’s pretty effective. Note: This review will contain spoilers, so, if you’re the delicate sort of flower who gets outraged by spoilers on a website, consider yourself warned.

I’m not going to recap the story of GET OUT, as you can find that all over the Net. Basically, you have Chris Washington, the black boyfriend of one Rose Armitage. The movie dog whistles its way through a number of key racial concerns, ones that hang heavier than ever in America.

You basically have Chris at the mercy of Rose and her family. The family have this bizarre scheme to steal black bodies. They perceive these bodies as being superior, and the enterprise involves Rose being a honeytrap to bring blacks to her neurosurgeon father and psychiatrist mother. Mom and Dad incapacitate the black victims, remove their brains, and basically plunk white brains into them. This cranial hijacking has been carried out in a number of cases.

The plot for GET OUT is pretty absurd, although the build-ups and details in the movie are pretty effective. The movie plays like a Dave Chappelle skit that is set to Horror instead of Comedy — but the darkly humorous/satirical nature of the story comes through, despite the overtly Horror nature of it. It’s definitely not a Comedy — but the Chappelle feel still lurks within the premise.

Some strong points in it are the creepy 70s vibe of it. I feel like the director was influenced by some classics of that era. THE WICKER MAN clearly seems to have been an influence. There were creepy bits, like the opening shot that had this weird kind of chanting (which came back near the end). The set design of the basement torture room is wickedly 70s, with shades of beige, brown, mustard and what-not.

Okay, so one thing that was hanging out there was that while Chris killed the Armitage clan and gets away with his best friend, he’s in real danger of being caught and arrested — after all, he and Rose were pulled over by a local white cop earlier in the movie, and while Rose manipulated the moment to prevent the cop from getting Chris’s ID (likely part of her overall strategy), the cop would at least know that he’d been there with her.

And the extended “family” of the Armitages who were there for the silent auction/bingo game where they bid on Chris — they all saw Chris. So, when the carnage that took place at that house is revealed, Chris is the one who’d get blamed for it. There’d be a manhunt for him almost immediately, once the multiple murders were discovered. Never mind that Chris was ultimately acting in self-defense — to the authorities, it would look like what it was: Chris violently killing the Armitage clan.

Therefore, contrary to the catharsis one usually feels at the end of most other Horror movies, in the case of GET OUT, one can only imagine the hell that Chris is going to have to endure. He’s going to have to be in hiding and/or out of the country. His Horror is going just beginning. And that this hangs over Chris says everything about the points Peele was trying to make to begin with.

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