La La Land is not for everyone. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking one of the middle acts kind of dragged a bit and Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling's voices left something to be desired. That's totally fine! Maybe you just need a different type of movie musical.
Maybe you need The Lure, from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska. It has mermaids and vampires. It has sleazy clubs. It has dudes getting eaten underwater. It has funny hats and fangs and subtitles. Want more trippy Polish synthpop instead of white-guy jazz? The Lure is definitely for you.
It's about "two mermaid sisters onto land, where they look for love, feast on human flesh and find work singing and stripping at a nightclub that might have come from an early David Lynch movie or a vintage-'80s music video," as the New York Times wrote. There will be no planetarium dances here, no John Legend, no bright-eyed youngsters looking to follow their dreams. No, The Lure is more comparable to a sleazy version of The Little Mermaid, where the burning question about mermaids—"What do they have going on down there?"—is definitely addressed.
And, as The Village Voice reports, "The Lure puts to shame any notion that something as bland as La La Land is the future of the movie musical."
It opens in select theaters this weekend. Here's the trailer:
