When horror nerds describe Jason Blum’s approach to the filmmakers he recruits for projects at Blumhouse, they’re likely to compare him to The Big Dawg, Roger Corman, in the way that he, similarly to the king of New World Pictures, has an eye for good talent that can deliver him a solid 90-minute release under-budget and on-time. To be fair, there’s plenty of support for that claim – the guy’s nurtured some fantastic filmmakers through their first projects (Damien Chazelle, Jordan Peele, etc.) and helped the Old Guard give their smaller-scale works a decent home (BlackkKlansman) – but Blum’s at his funniest when he’s actively imitating Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus, the men behind Cannon Films, who were hucksters supreme and brought gloriously trashy and entertaining concepts to life, with a fair amount of Hollywood-adjacent skullduggery along the way. The historical parallels aren’t there as often as they should be for a consistent comparison, but they’re hilarious when they line up as they do with Jeff Wadlow’s Imaginary, another PG-13 horror flick from the man who brought you Truth or Dare and the feature-length Fantasy Island remake. It’s dumb, too long, and oftentimes deliriously funny in unintentional ways. Still, if viewed as a massive troll job meant to directly fuck up a competitor’s forthcoming release, it becomes kind of brilliant.
The subject of that troll job is, of course, John Krasinski’s IF, which will hit theaters in a few months and is a similar take with a significantly larger budget on the concept within Imaginary – imaginary friends need kids to hang out with. If there’s no more room in Foster’s, the specters will walk the Earth, hoping to latch themselves on to some poor child needing a pal and get the free room and board that comes along with it. If I – a dude who has to keep up with the coming-and-goings of the multiplex release calendar so that I can make 2,000-word dick jokes every Friday – got confused between the two for months, I imagine that there’s gonna be a lot of parents who take their kids out to the theater this weekend thinking that they’ll get fuzzy Steve Carrell creatures and Ryan Reynolds ad-libs for a few hours. Instead, they’ll get Chauncy Bear, and at least you could visibly tell the difference between Chuck Norris and the Missing in Action crew when sized up next to Stallone and the Rambo: First Blood Part II gang. I don’t know if Krasinski’s script was floating around Hollywood for long enough to have a cheaper project like Imaginary get fast-tracked and 360 no-scope schedule-snipe it, but the similarities between the two are enough for me to believe it. Imaginary works best when viewed in that (albeit self-limiting) light – it is a hilarious prank pulled on a dude who’d much rather you’d saved your money for some of his Good News.
When you get past all that, though, you’re not really left with too much – even if IF sucks, this will likely still be The Illusionist to Krasinski’s The Prestige – even if Wadlow and company got to the better title first. The film is so stuffed with the cliches of modern Blumhouse that you’d assume they were making their own variation of the scavenger-hunt checklist that Chauncy Bear – a plain teddy bear in a little red vest — asks little Alice (Pyper Braun, who is a shockingly good actor for her age) to make for him. See, Alice found Chauncy in the basement of her new house during a game of hide-and-seek with her step-mom, Jessica (DeWanda Wise), and the two have slowly become inseparable.
At first, Jessica and her partner Max (Tom Payne) assume that it’s a cute new way for the girl to adjust to her new environment after suffering a great deal at the hands of her birth mom. Jessica assumes she’ll grow out of it, especially in the security of what was once Jessica’s own childhood home, though that has its own dark secrets to go with it – her father snapped one night when she was a girl, and he was never quite the same, the scars he left on his night-of-rampage reminding her each day of what terror can be around every corner. She privately doubts her ability to be a good mom, especially when her other step-daughter, 15-year-old Taylor (Taegan Burns), is sending her evaluations in the form of some “bitchy” text messages whenever Jessica does something she doesn’t like. But Chauncy has other plans for the girl, and his “scavenger hunt” might be a little more mystical than a childhood make-pretend quest – and Jessica, an artist with an overactive imagination, might be essential to this monster’s plans than it may seem at first blush.
Now, Wadlow’s budget hampers what he can do with his nightmares and dreamscapes – this, of course, goes to the same type of mystical fantasy land that Insidious: The Red Door and Night Swim goes to – and it’s kind of funny that Wadlow gets outcompeted in this department by a Disney Channel original movie (Don’t Look Under the Bed, which is probably the single best thing that company ever put on cable). And it also doesn’t help that Chauncy spends the movie mean-mugging, his expression going from mild to glowering in a way that involves the doll’s model being substituted instead of just lit in strange ways. You don’t need to manipulate an object as much to make it that scary – the stillness and the dark contrast between its innocence and its evil works is the spooky thing. It gets particularly funny at certain points, especially in a post-Ted world. Maybe if he had a dispensary down the street, Chauncy would have been a little cooler and more relaxed, but we get the Chauncy we deserve and not the one that we want – and this one is unintentionally hilarious rather than intentionally so.
It’s beyond Wadlow’s powers to make this bear scary, and a third-act reveal about him is especially silly, given that it throws the entire conceit into disarray (and justifies the name – imaginary friends aren’t usually objects). Imaginary is more boring than anything else – the film moves forward at a creep, going through the motions of your standard non-gory teen-friendly horror March release, and ends ultimately in a dull Poltergeist reference that might make you wish you were at home watching that instead. But as a way for Jason Blum and company to rain on Office Jim’s parade, it’s transcendent, so who knows – if you really hate the Quiet Place movies, maybe go check this out.