By Michael Marano

The sitcom tropes encourage director Sam Raimi to unleash his utterly demented black humor sensibilities.

Send Help, directed by Sam Raimi. Screening at cinemas throughout New England.

Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien in Send Help.

Back in the summer of 2000 I wrote a series of articles for an alt weekly about Survivor, when the show was new and buzzworthy, and not a well-trod TV institution that just wrapped its 49th (!) iteration. The first article addressed how Survivor recreated the social structure and psychological manipulations of the American workplace. All the usual back-biting politics and backstabbing of an office was transferred to an island, with the million-dollar prize basically being a zero-sum version of a retirement nest egg. The next article addressed how decades of dystopian science-fiction and horror about the media predicted what we’ve come to know as “reality TV.” What had been grotesque, science-fictional hyperbole had just morphed into the hottest show on TV. We forget there was controversy that Big Brother made light of Orwellian surveillance in 1984.

Now director Sam Raimi has made Send Help, a horror movie that takes the trends I noticed a quarter of a century ago and twists them around full circle. Back then, the antecedents of Survivor were the American workplace drama and scary genre fiction and films. With Send Help, Raimi and his writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have made Survivor the antecedent of American workplace drama and of a major genre film.

Send Help features America’s Sweetheart Rachel McAdams (OK, she’s Canadian, but… whatever) starring as Linda Liddle, a dorkily unkempt, near-sighted, and super-competent corporate wage slave who obsessively fangirls over Survivor, even building an impressive library of wilderness survival manuals so she can audition for the show. In a scene that is the exact opposite of how I tell my Fiction students to dish out exposition — but that works here because of McAdams’s delivery and Raimi’s bonkers sensibilities — she informs her pet bird that she’s ready for the promotion to Vice President promised her by the recently deceased founder of her company. (Never in the history of cinema has a tuna sandwich on rye been used so effectively as a prop in both this scene and the one that follows, but I digress.)

But, alas for poor, totes adorbs, mayonnaise-flecked Linda, Bradley, played by Teen Wolf‘s Dylan O’Brien, is the mega-douche-y Dude Bro son of the company’s late president. Bradley takes command of the company and a middle-management mini army of Patrick Bateman knock-offs who’d make any bar-full of women hastily cover their drinks. He gives Linda’s promised promotion to a guy from his frat with whom he plays golf.

Bradley loads his squad of Dude Bros and Linda into a private jet headed for a big meeting in Thailand and… well… as they used to say in the sitcom plot descriptions in TV Guide…WACKINESS ENSUES!

I make reference to sitcoms here, rather than bring up the more obvious notion of this story about castaways being a riff on Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away. The real kernel of Send Help is Gilligan’s Island, which, for all its goofiness, really was intended by creator Sherwood Schwartz to be socio-political commentary, with the island becoming a “social microcosm” for America as a whole. There are also the germs of a rom com in Send Help: it is established early on that Linda and Bradley had a bit of an off-camera, meet-cute, drunken flirt at the office Christmas party. The  “Enemies to Lovers” tropes are as carefully laid out as birdseed in a trap set by Wile E. Coyote, embellished by a few sidelong glances thrown between our leads as they’re in various states of undress.

These comedic tropes encourage Raimi to unleash his utterly demented black humor sensibilities. It would be criminal to describe them in detail, but there are set pieces in Send Help that could only have been made by the guy who dumped hundreds of gallons of blood (and other fluids) onto Bruce Campbell.

The foundations of wholesome sitcoms and rom coms are perverted gloriously. And the fact that McAdams and O’Brien both cut their teeth on teen fare — McAdams in Mean Girls and O’Brien in Teen Wolf — suggests that the office culture lampooned in Send Help is stuck in a La Brea Tar Pit of perpetual immaturity. All the bullshit of high school cliques, playing for the entirety of your life, until you retire.

That said, aside from the roller coaster set pieces of gore and uproarious black humor, Send Help contains a few too many dead spots. Brevity is the soul of satire — 15 or 20 minutes could have been chopped from Send Help easily. This is a movie that needs its state of psychosis to be maintained throughout. The dead spots allow the audience to come out of the fever dream a bit too often.

As a grotesque vision that tackles the sadism and immorality of 21st century corporate culture, Send Help would make a great double bill with Chan-Wook Park’s No Other Choice, which is about an executive’s program of serial murder to maintain his economic security. Both films look at the derangement of current corporate culture, and the sociopathy on display in both isn’t much of an exaggeration. It’d be too easy to say that Send Help and No Other Choice strip away the veneer of civilization. Because the psychopathy of corporate culture was never civilized.

Which brings me back to those articles I wrote 26 years ago. Back then, Survivor injected corporate culture into a wilderness. It pointed out, intentionally or not, that corporate culture is a wilderness. And, soon thereafter, the alt weekly where I published those pieces went more corporate. Like the office in Send Help, what followed was a surge of nepotism, conflicts of interest, dismissed verbal contracts, sexism, and Dude Bro aesthetics. I, and bunch of others, were fired. It was kind of fucked up, to see a workplace transformed so completely — the advent of consultants and focus groups accelerated things going to shit.

Back in 2000, Survivor felt like an initial warning of societal panic about the evolution of the workplace, an indicator of a looming breaking point, a harbinger of a real-life SF dystopia. The fact that Survivor, which used to feel like hyperbole, can be a matter-of-fact plot element of a hyperbolic movie like Send Help illustrates just how completely we’ve assimilated the exaggerated insanity Survivor had once embodied as normal.

Author, personal trainer, and writing coach Michael Marano hasn’t worked in an office for many years. www.GetOffMyLawnFitness.com.