Trash Talk and Chutzpah: Taskmaster Series 19 Looks Like the Most Competitive Yet

The secret of Taskmaster – the long-running comedy nonsense series that started life on Dave and now airs on Channel 4 in the UK – is that its contestants really want to win. The show’s comedians often feign insouciance and a take-it-or-leave-it approach to scoring points, but even its coolest customers secretly harbour a desire […]

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It is said that truth comes from the mouth of babes. And that well may be accurate, but sometimes that truth can take on a sinister and mean-spirited malevolence. It’s a deeper, more uncomfortable truism spinners of thrillers and chillers have known for ages. For as many novels as there are about the wonder years of adolescence pooling from Stephen King’s pen, he also gave the world Children of the Corn and its vision of a rural elementary school gaining a popular new fad: demon worship.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies reduced youngins to barbaric murderers, and little Linda Blair scared Oscar voters so badly they got over their aversion to horror movies and made The Exorcist the first supernatural genre picture nominated for Best Picture. Kids say the damndest things, and sometimes those things are damn scary to boot.

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So seems to be the inference in the wicked new trailer for writer-director Zach Cregger’s Weapons, the first feature effort behind the camera for Cregger since he wowed moviegoers with his twisted and twisty exercise in tension, Barbarian.

In Weapons, Julia Garner of Inventing Anna fame (as well as Wolf Man and an upcoming little curio called… Fantastic Four?) stars as Justine, an elementary school teacher in a small town undergoing an inexplicable phenomenon: one night at 2:17 a.m. in the suburban home of every child in her class, the kids woke up, quietly walked down stairs and… vanished out into the dark. None of them were ever seen again.

Understandably, questions are raised both within the audience and the town where grieving parents seeks to place the blame somewhere. And it is certainly an open question over what Justine knows about the kids in her class. But as the title cruelly teases, there are sinister implications for what is going on right here. Flashing insert shots of young hands wrapping around a screaming adult’s face, or of young bodies running like ghouls in the night around a house, all elicit a familiar primal terror: what if the kids are, in fact, not all right?

We obviously, and delightedly, do not have the answer in this particular instance, but our curiosity is piqued. That’s the sign of a good teaser and hook. Otherwise all we know for certain is that Cregger has described this one as “a horror epic.” He also is working with an elemental fear that those we naturally and biologically view as our future, our species’ closest stab at immortality—the truly innocent—could also be turned against us. The weapons of our destruction.

That is sick and twisted stuff, and perhaps apropos of the filmmaker who revealed the secrets inside the AirBnB from hell in Barbarian. Hopefully, there are similar surprises and unexpected swerves awaiting Justine’s search for the truth. Weapons also stars Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, and the forever welcome Alden Ehrenreich.

Weapons opens in theaters on Aug. 8.

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