Hey, Megalopolis: Here's how you do a "Critics hated our movie!" trailer

Last month, the distributors of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis got themselves in some self-inflicted trouble, trying to get out ahead of the film’s lackluster reviews by making a trailer that floated the idea that critics always hate Coppola’s movies at first, before eventually hailing them as genius. The only issue with said approach, turns out, was that it was pretty blatantly untrue (at least, among the big-name critics the trailer creators wanted to cite), and all the quotes in said trailer were completely made up, possibly by robots—so it just made everyone involved look lazy, dishonest, and stupid. By contrast, please imbibe the following trailer for new Dutch horror-comedy Krazy House, which uses a similar gambit—except every blistering, negative quote is absolutely true.

Sure, there’s still some cherry-picking: Former A.V. Club editor Katie Rife, in her review for IndieWire, gets quoted for noting the Too Many Cooks-esque horror movie plays “Like an Adult Swim infomercial directed by black-metal teenagers,” but they skip the part where she describes it as “way too much and a bunch of nothing at the same time.” (Or notes, as many critics have, that its 86-minute running time ends up feeling interminable.) But it’s still a pretty clever attempt to position the film, which stars Nick Frost and Alicia Silverstone as stock ’90s sitcom characters who violently lose their minds in the face of an ongoing home invasion, as too gonzo to miss. (You know what you’re at least purportedly getting when a film proudly crows that it’s “an edgelord wasteland.”) The “All the right people hate it!” tactic also serves to help spackle over the fact that the horror-comedy’s trailer doesn’t seem to have any actual jokes in it, outside its basic format-switching premise. Which is, by the by, also the root of many of the actual critiques of the film, when you go and read them in full—most of which openly accept the movie, which debuted at Sundance, as energetically excessive, but damn it for doing little with any of the provocative shit it’s playing with. (The prevailing sin levied against it, looking around at critical notices, isn’t that it’s tasteless, but that it’s dull and exhausting.)

Krazy House has an interesting pedigree, coming as it does from writer-director team Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, who broke out in Dutch TV in the late 2000s as part of sketch comedy show New Kids. Krazy House is their first English-language film; the film arrives on digital platforms on October 4.