Edward Gunhands

Calling Guns Akimbo (2020) a horror movie is kind of stretching things. It's gory enough, and there's a bit of body horror, but I mainly queued it up because it looked like fun. Stupid fun.

The movie sets up the premise quickly: An underground fight club/most dangerous game called Skizm is live streaming death matches. It becomes insanely popular, with everyone watching it, especially when Samara Weaving is competing and killing. Daniel Radcliffe is a regular shlub who works at a computer gaming company and has a beautiful Instagram model (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) as an ex-girlfriend. In his spare time, he likes to troll message boards, and is pretty good at it. So good that he gets the leader of the Skizm crew, Ned Dennehy, mad at him. Dennehy is a skinny older psycho with a face full of crude tattoos. This won't be good.

So Radcliffe is attacked, beaten, and drugged. When he wakes up, he finds two guns bolted to his hands. I mean bolted right through the palm and out the back, with each finger screwed down as well. He has also been entered into a death match, versus the ever-victorious Weaving.

But first he has to figure out how to pee with guns for hands - without shooting anything off.

He goes to the police, but they just see a guy with two guns, and tase him - which causes him to involuntarily fire, killing one of the cops. He runs to his ex-girlfriend, who doesn't want to get involved. He goes to his office, but all he gets is grief from his obnoxious boss - until he starts waving his guns around. Then Weaving shows up and shoots up the place. The only person who is at all helpful is the homeless loony Rhys Darby, who gives him something to eat - which of course he has to feed him by hand.

So the first couple of acts are a series of fast-paced chases and shoot-em-ups. At some point, Radcliffe is going to have to stop reacting and somehow fight back. How it all wraps up isn't exactly clever, or particularly character driven. But it work well enough - better than if he suddenly becomes a crack shot.

Well, I wasn't expecting it to be clever, I was expecting it to be stupid. I don't think you could function for long with guns bolted to your hands. Not even stapled. I don't think you could pull the triggers. But at least in the end, he doesn't get the girl. His ex stays ex, although she may dine out on having known him when.