Let’s Scare Julie (2019)

Hey, it’s a bunch of horrible teens who play a horrible prank and things go horribly wrong. What more could you want… except for some likable protagonists. 

Emma’s mother recently died so she’s moved in with her cousin Taylor, a girl who alternates between sensitive and manipulative.  Taylor and her friends sneak into Emma’s room to scare her while she sleeps.  It goes as planned until Emma has an asthma attack and needs her inhaler.  Emma is upset, but Taylor tells her to chill out. 

The other girls are worse than Taylor. Madison is one of those girls you wonder why anyone would put up with her.  She’ll break your boundaries all she wants, but don’t you dare cross hers. She’ll make fun of you and pressure you into doing what she wants, and if you don’t do it, you’re a loser. The best thing you can say about her is she doesn’t play favorites because she’s brutal to everyone. So why does she have any friends?

The girls tell stories about the house across the street where a recluse used to live. She may have been evil and the house may have been haunted. A new family moved in that day and Emma reports she saw a teenager in the driveway with a scarf over her face.  

Taylor and her mean friends decide to sneak into the neighbors house and scare the new girl, Julie.  They get the key to her house, put on masks, and promise Emma they won’t do anything horrible to her.  I don’t know why they have a key to the house, or why they don’t see the issue with essentially breaking into someone’s home.

Although they plan to meet back at Taylors after they scare Julie, only one girl ends up back at the house. When Emma presses her what happened, the girl doesn’t reveal much other than it was awful and only two of them got to Julies room.  Then Emma realizes her little sister is missing and fears she may have gone across the street, following the other girls.   After this everything is chaos, but kind of slow paced chaos.

Questions after watching this film: why would you pull gauze off a strangers face?  If you’re hiding in someone else’s house in the dark, why would you leave the flashlight of your phone on? And how did they not see that, or the light from the screen? Who is Shannon? Is she important to the plot? What did Emma do to her that was so awful? Why was the dick pick Emma got even mentioned?  Why did Madison waive a gun around if it was never going to come into play?  Have they never heard of Chekhov’s gun?  What teenager has their phone set up so that it can ring fourteen times and not go to voicemail? And why was Uncle Vince’s T-shirt covered in blood? It’s never explained.  Also he admitted to previously accidentally killing a kid which explains the alcoholism, but to just blurt that out - why? And where did he go? He just disappeared.

Apparently this movie was filmed in one continuous camera shot, with a few exceptions like a reaction shot. That’s really cool but I feel weird saying I didn’t notice.  

Okay it would be creepy to look up and see people in masks
in your house, but since they’re teenage girls, you might also
try to beat the crap out of them

How do they not miss her hiding in the dark
with her phone lighting up the shower?