“To Your Last Death” Movie Review by Josh Davis (SPOILERS) : Pop Culture Leftovers

“To Your Last Death” Movie Review by Josh Davis (SPOILERS)

September 27, 2020 7:58 pm |

This. Movie. Is. Gross.

Billed as the first ever U.S.-made 2D animated horror film, “To Your Last Death” looks like an excessively gory comic book come to life.

However, this is not the groundbreaking visual landmark of, say, “Into the Spider-Verse.”

Rather, the visual style is vaguely reminiscent of an episode of “Liquid Television” from the 1990s. Characters, essentially, look like paper cutouts walking across static backgrounds.

Many of the landscapes are impressively detailed and the characters twitch with life in an exaggerated and often grotesque manner. All the men have big muscles and scars, and all the women have tiny waists and big breasts. It’s done well enough, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

An impressive voice cast includes Morena Baccarin (“Deadpool,” “Gotham”) as the Gamemaster, William Shatner (“Star Trek”) as the Overseer, Ray Wise (“Twin Peaks,” “24,” “Reaper”) as Cyrus DeKalb, and Dani Lennon (“Save Point,” “Bite Me”) as Miriam DeKalb.

Cyrus DeKalb is a billionaire industrialist and certifiably horrible father. His campaign to become vice president was once torpedoed when his four children, now all grown up, came forward to make public the brutal abuse that they suffered at his hand.

Sometime later, Cyrus summons each of them to the corporate headquarters of his company, DeKalb Industries, to tell them that he is dying. However, it’s not long before everyone realizes it’s a trap.

Rather than try and make amends, Cyrus describes each of his children as “the looney, the epileptic homo, the auto erotic asphyxiator, and the whore,” and he judges and sentences each to a brutal death. Only Miriam escapes, to find herself in a hospital and questioning her sanity.

Of course, there is a twist. The Gamemaster, a shadowy and demonic figure, appears before Miriam to offer her a choice: go back in time, knowing what she knows, and try to change the fate of her siblings – or else stay in the hospital.

After she decides to go back and try again, the movie cuts to a scene revealing the Gamemaster overseeing a cosmic gambling ring that’s watching to see how the events of the DeKalb family unfold.

Miriam, now back at DeKalb Industries, tries to warn her siblings of the trap about to be sprung. They don’t believe her, and are once again judged and sentenced by their father.

After narrowly surviving a plummeting elevator covered in barbed wire, Miriam then has to save each of her siblings from a series of similarly brutal traps. She also must avoid her father’s ghoulish thugs, including a Russian Frankenstein with a terrible bloodlust, named Jurek.

About 40 minutes in, there’s a scene that could be extremely triggering to some, involving a character who is strapped into a chair and forced to self-mutilate. The scene is so graphic and excessive that it would make the “Saw” movies blush, complete with live sharks in a tank nearby, waiting to catch the literal buckets of blood spilled by the gruesome trap.

The movie doesn’t get any better from there.

After roughly an hour of relentlessly violent encounters, Miriam must face her father in a final “boss fight” reminiscent of nearly every video game ever made. She questions her sanity, and, for a moment, the audience is led to believe she’s not sure if the entire episode was real, or just a delusion from a hospital bed.

Like the rest of the film, the moment is half-baked.

“To Your Last Death” looks and feels like it was made by an angry, horny 12-year-old raised on junk food, bad 1990s horror movies and death metal. For those looking for a torture-porn comic book come to life in vivid, gory, bloody detail, congratulations. This is your “Citizen Kane.”

For those looking for a fun and inventive animated horror movie — or even a good movie — keep looking.

PCL Rating: Toss It

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ROTTEN