G(l)ory Days

What happens when the boogeyman’s most relentless adversary is no longer the final girl, but the unstoppable march of time? This is the delightfully morbid question driving Cory DeMeyers’ "G(l)ory Days," a twenty-seven-minute horror-comedy tracking the fragile egos and fading stamina of retired slashers. Hulk and Turtleneck, two aging homicidal relics, have retreated to a quiet lakeside cabin to rest their weary bones and bicker amongst their macabre trophies. They're artifacts of an analog era of terror, relegated to reminiscing about their undisputed prime at the very site of their most infamous unsolved massacre.

Their violent retirement is abruptly disrupted by the arrival of a modern social media influencer and her girlfriend—the latter harboring a deep, unresolved tie to the one victim who got away. Rather than a standard legacy-revenge thriller, the script by Adam Pasen and Sammy Horowitz pivots into a fiercely competitive battle of egos. The fresh arrivals become a scoreboard; a deadly bet is struck to determine who is truly the more prolific killer. What ensues is a dark sport fueled by toxic masculine pride and a desperate, elderly craving for one last taste of relevance.

Tonally, the film bypasses meta-satire to embrace a broad, slapstick energy reminiscent of a blood-soaked iteration of Roald Dahl’s The Twits, with the killers constantly sabotaging each other. While this premise threatens to devolve into cheap farce, DeMeyers’ extensive background as a stunt performer anchors the chaos. The violence possesses a distinct, kinetic panache; woodland chases become an athletic, rhythmic ballet of flying limbs and arterial spray. Combined with Jeff McEvoy’s crisp editing and Alex Weinstein’s counterintuitively upbeat score, the film maintains a brisk, infectious momentum.

"G(l)ory Days" doesn't pretend to reinvent the bloody wheel, offering instead a sharply produced, immensely entertaining exercise in murderous nostalgia. Boasting a stellar animated title sequence and top-tier practical gore, it is a testament to filmmakers executing exactly what they set out to achieve. It is a wry, wicked reminder that even when the joints ache and the peak is in the rearview mirror, there is still plenty of life left in the old monsters yet.