‘Family Movie’ Review: Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick Horror Comedy

It’s hard to be too upset with Family Movie, especially if you’re at all a fan of any of the Bacon-Sedgwicks. Starring the filmmaking family as a filmmaking family who are making a film together when a dead body turns up, the cheekily meta horror-comedy benefits hugely from the audience’s preexisting goodwill toward this clan.

It’s just plain cute to see married couple Kevin Bacon (who also directed) and Kyra Sedgwick draw from what we can only assume is their real-life chemistry to play Jack, a director, and Ellen, his wife and leading lady. Or to imagine how much of Ellen’s protectiveness toward her actress daughter, Ulla, must mirror Kyra’s toward her own actress daughter and co-star, Sosie Bacon.

“I like when we do things as a family,” says Jack and Ellen’s son, Trent; the very existence of this film suggests the actor who plays him, Kevin and Kyra’s son, Travis Bacon, feels the same.

But not being upset with a movie is not quite the same thing as loving it. As a celebration of the Bacon-Sedgwick clan’s bond and a love letter to their craft, Family Movie is sweet and sincere. As an actual movie to be enjoyed by people who don’t share those last names, it has all the limitations of, well, a family movie.

Though the Smiths are clearly modeled after the Bacon-Sedgwicks, the differences are just as obvious. Jack Smith is a director who’s spent his career churning out microbudget horror flicks on his own rural property, using his own family as cast and crew. That none of his films ever seem to find commercial or critical success (to date, the biggest premiere any of them have had was at the Teaneck International Film Festival, and that was two decades ago) does not deter him. He’s in this for the love of the game.

His family is not quite as enthusiastic. While his projects provide Ellen with a steady stream of roles, they also keep the couple in debt, especially as it’s been ages since she’s worked with anyone else. His children have no interest in following a similar path. Ulla is preparing to fly the coop, going on auditions she’s too scared to tell her family about. And while Trent doesn’t mind helping his dad around set, he’d like to start pursuing his own passions, which lie more in metal music and Muay Thai.

With both kids ready to get out, everyone understands that Jack’s latest project, Blood Moon, will be the last one they make as a family for the foreseeable future. But then — the body.

Its owner is the Smiths’ asshole neighbor, Bill (John Carroll Lynch). It comes to its lifeless state through a combination of bad luck and Ellen’s righteous fury. Ellen intends to clean up the mess on her own, but as the rest of the family catches on to what’s happened, finishing Blood Moon takes a backseat to the far more urgent priority of covering up the crime. And then, as more inconvenient deaths crop up around them, covering up all those crimes as well.

As befits Jack’s super-indie career, Family Movie projects a loose and scrappy vibe. The tone is cheerful and relaxed and more than a little zany, especially as the body count goes up. The script (by Dan Beers) is more interested in dumb, blunt fun than depth or nuance. Though there’s plenty of blood, the violence is hardly what you’d call graphically realistic; the effects look only a few steps up from something Jack himself might cook up in the kitchen.

It’s a forgiving mode for the film to operate in, one that has the power to make even some of its potential weaknesses look, under the right blood-moon light, like strengths. Do the performances sometimes veer too broad or too stiff? You could see it as the actors falling down on the job, or you could decide it just adds to the charmingly homemade vibe. Are any of the jokes all that funny or original? Not really, but various Bacons deliver them with all the proud glee of a kid starring in their first school play. (In fairness, I did laugh quite a bit when Travis’ hookup buddy Maya, an aspiring filmmaker played by Liza Koshy, describes him as “what happens when participation trophies grow up and start kicking things.”)

Are the characters too vaguely drawn and their arcs too abrupt for any of them to come off like real people? Sure, but would you even want this film to pretend it’s doing anything smarter than it is? Family Movie is a project that seems to exist entirely because the Bacon-Sedgwick clan just thought it’d be fun to collaborate on something, and that’s being released for the rest of us entirely because the Bacon-Sedgwicks are the Bacon-Sedgwicks. For some fans, maybe that’ll be enough. I think I preferred the actual home movies of the actual Kevin, Kyra, Sosie and Travis that play over the ending.