It’s amusing to see viewers of The Drone trash the film on whatever site they streamed/stole it from, tapping such keen observations as “This isn’t scary at all.”
Well, duh, because it’s not meant to be. Granted, shame on the Lionsgate marketing department for misleadingly pushing The Drone as a straight-ahead horror-thriller, but anyone paying a quarter of attention to tone — hell, I’ll be generous and round down to one-eighth — can tell it’s a comedy.
After all, we’re talking about a remote-controlled drone possessed with the soul of its late owner — a serial peeper-cum-rapist-cum-killer of redheads, known as The Violator (Neil Sandilands, TV’s Hap and Leonard) — upon being struck by a fatal bolt of lightning. Hey, it worked for Chucky, right? That its very premise is beyond preposterous is very much the point.
The titular gizmo finds its way to newly married new homeowners Rachel (Alex Essoe, Doctor Sleep) and Chris (John Brotherton, The Conjuring), where it surreptitiously makes a sex tape of them and senses the family dog as a threat to its existence — so much so the machine Googles “animal shelter”! Anyone taking the “flying pervert machine” as anything but parody of contemporary horror, The Drone has whooshed over their noggin like a joke they didn’t get or, well, like a drone.
At the helm of this techno-terror circus is Zombeavers director Jordan Rubin, bringing his fellow writers, Al and John Kaplan, for another round of making light of ridiculous horror-flick trends. While not up to the hilarious heights of that underrated 2014 comedy, The Drone offers enough absurdity to keep Rubin on my radar.
If nothing else, you could spend the movie looking for visual nods to iconic scenes from other genre fare, including Alien 3, The Exorcist III and numeral-free The Shining. But don’t let that distract you from seeing the drone using Snapchat and committing murder by invading someone’s rectum. —Rod Lott