Milk & Serial (2024)

Unrated, because I have officially watched my first YouTube movie.  There's a lot of swearing and a fair bit of murder.  Because it's a horror movie, there's some brutal violence and I don't want to up-or-downplay.  Treat it almost like a short from V/H/S.  We're in that era of found footage where there's going to be something shocking often shown from a stagnant camera.  The specific violence I'm talking about is the kind of violence that doesn't cut away, which is often quite upsetting.

DIRECTOR:  Curry Barker

Yeah, I watched a YouTube movie. Do you understand what kind of leap of faith that was?  It's the first time a movie was texted to me.  I had debates about actually having to write about this.  Then I realized it was just my old man side coming out, being too snobbish for the way that things are released.  As of right now, I think my criteria for "What necessitates a movie?" is "Is it on IMdB or on Letterboxd?"  If those criteria are met, I guess I don't mind writing about it.

Now, there's something genuinely impressive about Milk & Serial.  I'm going to speak positively about this first because a lot of my frustrations with this movie come from a "me thing" more than a quality thing.  For a completely independent film, the movie mostly works.  The idea behind found footage horror is really a great idea for low budget filmmaking.  Now, we have to kind of shift our perspective when it comes to found footage films.  Rarely do we have the ability to criticize or analyze the cinematography or the technical elements of the film.  There still are technical things going on with the movie, but they are more functionality over aesthetics.  It's kind of what has burned me out on found footage horror to begin with.  (I used to be really into it.  Then the novelty wore off.) Acting wise, though, we have some things we can discuss.  Good found footage movies have to involve good improvisers.  Sure, Milk & Serial might have had a script, but there's an element of truth that comes from actors who can pull off natural sounding dialogue.  From that perspective, Milk & Serial is top notch, especially considering that it is a completely independent film.  These movies either have the most authentic dialogue or the least, and Milk & Serial comes out pretty good on that front.

There's also a fairly solid middle to this movie.  The beginning is what is needed for the film, but it also isn't potentially the most engaging. What the beginning of the film is ultimately doing is setting up for the needle drop.  Because I love petting myself on the back, I guessed 90% of the twist pretty early on.  But the final delivery of how it played out, it caught me by surprise.  And that surprise is fairly engaging.  I was invested in the characters. The story is fun and kept me going.  But with that in mind, the ending really drags.  From what I understand, these guys make a lot of horror and comedy shorts.  I kind of get that because, clocking in at 62 minutes, Milk & Serial feels like they're trying to pad out a conceit that does not support a 62 minute movie.  Once that mic drop happens in the first 40 minutes, the movie should bow out, knowing that we delivered our twist on how we viewed the entire first half. But the problem is, the movie tries to talk about the fallout of the revelation.  

I'm dancing around this not to spoil the movie, aren't I?  It's weird how sometimes I can just come right out and say what the twist was.  With the case of Milk & Serial, I'm playing it pretty cagey because I don't think a lot of people would have watched this movie.  I get the vibe that my limited readership mostly clicks my stuff to see if they gel with my thoughts on movies they've already seen. But I also get the vibe that people might click on the link because they want to know what Milk & Serial actually is.  So, just to cover my bases, from here on out, there will be SPOILERS.  Okay?   Cool.

The first third of the film establishes that Milk and Seven are comedy influencers who are known as the Prank Bros.  Their names make me think of Good Mythical Morning, especially considering that one of the side characters is named "Link".   The rules of prank movies closely follow the rules of con artist movies.  If one person is pranking another, there's an even deeper prank going on in the background.  I stand by this argument.  It's how you know that Milk is the one pulling all of the strings. Now, where the movie does a better job than I do is how insane Milk is.  Okay, I like that a lot.  But the issue is that once we found out how Milk got Seven to murder Gary, that's the end of the story.  That's the drop.  Everything beyond that is anticlimactic.  Honestly, the movie didn't need to wrap up everything with a bow.  The message of the film is how far people would go for fame and the movie kind of forgets that at a certain point. 

Heck, there's one scene that is completely superfluous for the sake of padding out of a film.  Milk kidnaps Lara.  We see how he does this through Milk's uploaded footage and it's pretty rad.  It heavily implies that he kills her.  The problem is, once the big reveal happens that Milk is the big bad guy of the entire story, we go back and we see that Milk has not killed Lara.  He says "Surprise, bet you all thought she was dead" or something like that.  Then he proceeds to kill her.  Why?  Outside of the fact that the movie needed more gore and minutes, it does nothing to serve the story.  We know that Milk is a psychopath by this point. Nothing character-wise hinges on this concept.  It's just brutality for brutality's sake, which is my least favorite horror trope.  

My other frustration with the movie is the title.  Oh man, that is a forced title.  It's the same problem I had with Across the Universe.  If you are going to do a musical using the music of The Beatles, it's a cop out to name a character "Jude."  In the early planning stages for Milk & Serial, they came up with the title first and reverse engineered it.  That bums me out.  I know.  It shouldn't be that big of a deal.  But it also has the bigger issue that we see in "Piano Man".  No one calls it "tonic and gin."  It's a gin and tonic.  The same is true for Milk & Serial.  It's cereal and milk.  That title, my guys, no bueno.  I know it's something small to complain about, but I have all of this digital real estate and, gosh darn it, I'm going to use it.

But the most important thing about Milk & Serial is its commentary on content creator culture.  I'm not sure if it is an intentional beauty or hidden irony that makes two guys who make internet videos the gatekeepers of internet culture.  The things that these guys get is the almost immorality of some content creation.  Listen, I'm a guy writing a blog (I see the irony!) who is obsessed with movies (a media that is seen as antiquated by Gen Alpha). And I know that there is ethical content creators, so this movie isn't exactly painting with a wide brush. But the notion behind prank videos seem a little sketchy.  It's this toxic environment where there's a fine line between "nobody's getting hurt" to "a place where no one feels safe."  Milk & Serial is almost a commentary on escalation and what real friendship is about.  I'm really showing my age in this, talking about these kids in this fashion, but that's kind of what the movie is getting at.  While I don't consider Milk & Serial necessarily elevated film, it is a movie with something to say, even if that thing is pretty specific.

At the end of the day, someone went out there and made a movie for $800.  It's a completely watchable movie that can stand on its own two feet and have something to say simultaneously.  While I probably won't preach this movie to anyone, I wouldn't begrudge people watching the film, especially during spooky season.