FEAR PHARM (2020) is ostensibly just another Texas-chainsaw-massacre-themed slasher with a dash of jokes on top of a helping of gore.
Four friends are selected for a VIP corn maze and offered a cash prize if they can traverse it in under two hours. Naturally, they discover along the way that the horror characters they encounter are not "just" trying to scare them.
It turns out that the villains actually have a motivation beyond pure bloodlust which brings the movie's title full circle, and it is always a delight to see that at least some thought went into formulating a movie's concept. The ending scene is a wonderful exercise in black humor.
Though the film is decently shot, some directorial choices bring it down, unfortunately. Chief among these, in my opinion, is the prologue. It is not only unnecessary but actually counterproductive. It shows that the villains really are murderous, and thereby destroys any plausible deniability that could have been sustained in the first act of the film by its light-hearted tone and especially the funny "business meeting" introduction of the family. Had we found out that these guys really mean business only once they started hurting our group, it would have been that much more shocking.
Other unwise choices in my opinion were the repetitive panning shots over the corn maze that cheapened the movie's feel, the curious cut-aways during actual gore scenes (was this because of the MPAA?) and some implausible sequences, such as a character whose arm was just amputated reviewing his acting as if nothing was literally amiss.
Also, while there is a colorful band of villains, only some of them are really fleshed out. I had trouble distinguishing between a couple of them.
I think with a few different choices, a better fleshed-out characterization of each member of this family and a tad more creative gore scenes, this could have been a good horror movie. It just missed the mark.
