Us (2019) KILL COUNT

[Music] welcome to the killcount where we tally up the victims in all our favorite horror movies I'm James Agee nice and today we're looking at us released in 2019 my director Jordan Peele us as Jordan peels follow-up to his massively successful directorial debut get out while US like get out can still be categorized as socially conscious horror there are quite a few differences between this and peels first film for one thing while get out was more genre curious and maybe a bit more on the thriller side of things us is much more clearly a horror movie with the scares coming hard and fast and the kills more numerous and graphic us also has more humor in it which is great if you're a fan of peels comedy like I am sure get out head solid comedic relief in the form of Rod Williams TS motherfucking a but in us pretty much everyone's cracking jokes then they rub some viewers the wrong way but how could anyone get upset watching comedic genius and all-around good boy Tim Heidecker finally peels two films have distinct thematic differences as well get out examined race relations and the way seemingly well-meaning limousine liberals can Harbor prejudices just as nasty as anyone else but us has nothing to do with race and instead can be read as an allegory about class the way our society keeps certain kinds of people at a disadvantage if it means the rest of us can continue living in comfort to explore such a big theme us has a much bigger story and it ends up portraying a nationwide affair as opposed to the very self-contained story that we saw and get out along with that expansion comes some plot holes and logic leaps but if you're more in the themes and atmosphere like I am us is a very worthy second effort by mr. Jordan Peele you can hear a deeper discussion about this movie by watching our review of it on the podcast but right now let's see how many bodies we can unearth and get to the kills [Music] the movie begins by telling us that there are a whole lot of underground tunnels in the United States and that most of them are abandoned thanks for the fun fat Jordan but I came here to watch a horror movie not to read a Snapple cap it's 1986 and the hip new charity stunt sweeping the nation is Hands Across America an actual event that took place that tried to raise funds to fight homelessness and poverty this summer six million people will tether themselves together to fight hunger in the United States a subsequent commercial transitions us to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk where this little girl Adelaide is celebrating her birthday after her father wins her a Thriller t-shirt she ends up unwisely wandering off on her own she passes the gentleman advertising biblical verses and makes her way down to the beach where she finds a carnival attraction that wouldn't get made in the modern day the shaman's Vision Quest Hey look daddy you can find yourself in there and hopefully she can also find a new candy apples and she just up and wasted the one she had the maze is full of spooky Hootie who's and funhouse mirrors but things get for real scary after the lights go out and the endless reflections get addy a little lost even worse is when she backs up into a reflection that doesn't quite move the right way because turns out this isn't a reflection at all yowee Wow II the opening credits play over a cryptic image of a wall of caged Gravatt accompanied by an original theme by composer Michael Abel's [Music] Able's also did the score for get out and peel was actually encouraged to use them again for this movie by Steven Spielberg who compared peel and Abel's to Spielberg and John Williams can't turn a dude down after that comparison we're now in the present day and addy is a grown woman played by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o who has one of those families that advertises its membership on the back window of their vehicle her hilarious husband Gabe Wilson played by Winston Duke is an expert at embarrassing their kids Zora and Jason whether it's by waking them up with yelling or simply dab it on them haters the Wilson family is vacationing at their Santa Cruz Lake house where they talk about Zoras potential future as a track star and Jason's inability to master a close-up magic trick he has this thing called bullshit hey Gabe decides that they should all go to the beach and that gives addy flashbacks to her post shamans quest childhood although she had only been away from her parents for 15 minutes young addy fell completely silent upon her return and was even diagnosed with PTSD by a therapist which really upset her parents she's local in an effort to help heal addy of whatever trauma she adored her parents enlisted her in dance class has revealed in this nicely creepy flashback that grown up at he has stopped looking at me swan dancer on the lake behind their house gabe unveils his latest purchase a boat he oh what's that boats name [Music] hell yeah Gabe let's get cray-cray on the Crawdaddy you know if you can actually keep it running properly oh my god it I got it that's taught me how to do this they leave the Crawdaddy behind and take their car to the Santa Cruz Beach where Jason continues being a little potty mouth kiss my whoa whoa a nice is enough customer I would have actually preferred you use a curse word in this case after bonding over the classic Lunas song I got five on it which every generation can enjoy they arrive at their sandy destination which Addie is just so excited about really this is just super before they reach the beach they see a dead man being wheeled into an ambulance Addie realizes that the dude is the same guy with the Jeremiah 11:11 sign that she saw on the boardwalk as a child Addie and the audience may not know it just yet but something big has already begun the Wilson family and their shadows walk across the sandy beach to hang out with their friends Josh and Kitty Tyler played by an on-screen couple I never knew I needed tim heidecker and Elizabeth moss they're so good at being awful people what do we say I hate you that works yeah yeah okay Jason wanders off on his own like mother like son I suppose and sees both the updated Beach funhouse as well as the dude standing eerily by himself his arms outstretched to nothing and no one in particular oh and his hands dripping blood too no bueno but hey little dude could you try not disappearing on your mom like that she doesn't need any more beachside trauma unless we want to turn her into Martin Brody that night after Andy tells aura Jason and Jason's Wolf Man mask good night she decides to have a serious conversation with Gabe poor timing for him since he was just about to ask her to mbaku that thing up hey Gabe I want to go are you trying to go staring at her own reflection in the window and he tells Gabe that when she got lost in that maze as a child she ran into another girl who looked exactly like her now she's worried that that doppelganger girl is coming to get her due to a whole bunch of weird little coincidences she's been noticing ever since they got to Santa Cruz as if on cue the lights go out and Jason appears in their room to tell them some distressing news there's a family our driveway and that family is one unsettling sight man standing silhouetted in front of a streetlight holding hands Gabe doesn't think it's that big a deal though and to prove it he goes outside and tries to speak to the other family only to find them totally unresponsive and he calls the cops but there's still 14 minutes away so gay batters up to defend his loved ones which should work just fine as long as those weirdos don't start acting too creepy Oh abort abort that shits way too crazy the Wilson family bunkers down in their house as their scary counterparts outside surrounded a shadow carrying scissors and whistling approaches the front door and uses the lake house as hide a key to open it and who should walk in but Gabe's doppelganger wearing a red jumpsuit and looking much more intimidating than the dorky dad we know and love in fact all four members of the Wilson family have a red jumpsuit achat oh version present and accounted for and the doppelganger silently stared the Wilsons into a seated position as they begin to realize exactly who they're looking at touch the matriarch of these mimic Reese uses her very raspy voice to tell the Wilsons who they are and where they came from framing their story as a fairy tale you see once upon a time the ADI doppelganger named red says that the girl and her shadow were tethered in a way so that they had the same life experiences at the same time except sounds like the shadows versions of events were way super shittier cuckoo and her first child a beautiful shadow a monster because of all this read says that the shadow hated the girl and now that the shadow is here she's ready to handcuff the girl to a table real fast we've got to give credit to the entire cast who all had to play two distinct characters as well as the crew who made sure that fact never distracted the audience this scene plays just as smoothly as if there were eight separate people acting in these parts and that's impressive as hell special props go to Lupita Nyong'o who plays two lead characters simultaneously one of the first things he said to me was Lupita you're gonna be very tired and he delivered on that promise to make this work they would usually shoot the more passive roles the day after shooting the more active ones like red who was so intense that Nyong'o stayed in character the entire time she was on set question watching our children this is before they get up and all this before the attacks well there's well she's still sitting okay it also probably helps that when yunga was playing addy she had Jordan Peele doing an excellent mimicry of her red voice the other family members and their doppelgangers break off into partner first Gabe's tethered version Abraham steals his glasses that drags him out of the house so he can beat that bitch with the bass then red challenges aura to a footrace with her mirror hombre by telling her to run ha they're gonna be training buddies together make sure you do a proper warm-up now finally red sets up a playdate between Jason and his be masked counterpart named Pluto after warning since Pluto's a little pyro who lights a match so he can watch Jason try to do his magic trick thanks for the light pal but you sure you should be playing with fire um again I guess down the street hombre catches up to Zora and plays ring around the sedan with her before hopping up onto the roof of this car and threatening Zora with a pair of golden scissors luckily Zoras saved when the cars angry owner comes outside get off my car the distraction gives Zora chance to escape and while she runs away we see and hear that dude get killed when hombre stabs him with her golden scissors Gabe finds himself in a trash bag on the Crawdaddy his captor Abraham also equipped with a pair of shiny scissors when the boat gives out on him Abraham tries to founds it back into working order which gives Gabe a chance to break out of the bag grab the bat and knock his shadow into the lake Abraham jumps out of the water like little boy swamp Jason and tries to stab Gabe but he stopped when Gabe Fonz's the boat engine back to life with a headbutt that starts the motor up and kills Abraham by chopping him up in the propeller way to use your head their game with their families out having fun the mobs are finally able to have some one-on-one and red tells addy that they've been waiting a long time for this day good before red can finish pushing at his face through that table though Jason sparks his rear little magic trick and manages to lock Pluto in the closet by himself the bird boys cries for help draw red away and after letting Pluto out she begins to hunt for Jason with her scissors that Bunny's not Jason red quit wasting time while she's dilly dallying around and he uses a fire poker and some leverage to free herself from the table although she's still stuck in the cops she calls Jason out of his hiding spot so they can get the heck out of this house before that creepy lucha kid and his raspy voice mom come and get him go go go Zora joins her mother and brother and the three of them escape to the doct aboard the Crawdaddy with her tall daddy sorry tethered friends we've only got four life jackets on board got to be safe wouldn't want another Titanic you know bayi over at Josh and Kitty's house their ideal wife of indolence is interrupted by a power flicker and the noise of someone shuffling around outside there's a person walking around outside her fucking house probably a squirrel I don't know would you please get up and look I'm busy I'm I'm busy Josh ignores it and has his home AI Ophelia play some good vibrations but his laziness comes at a cost when their twin daughters Becca and Lindsay gets stabbed by tethered versions of themselves who appear inside the house God the cut to the quieter outside shot is such well done or directing it's so damn spooky shadows Josh and Kitty also appear and stab their counterparts and the attack kills Josh immediately awesome kill great job kitty however initially survived and gurgling lots of blood crawls to the feet of Josh's tether counterpart named Tex who offers her some help down low whoops too slow maybe Kitty can get some help from the technology that's made her life so easy oh really I call the police sure playing fuck the police by NWA no kitty gets her throat slit by her own counterpart named dolly of and honestly I'm kind of relieved that it cuts away for him despite the funny ol philia bit that was one intense and effective home invasion I didn't need a graphic throat slit thrown into the mix to the Wilson's arrived to get help for they're friends only for a D to get pulled into the house by the tethered twins yeah neighbors who needs a game tells his kids to run away so he can fight d very entertaining tax even though game is still pretty beat up from his scuffle with Abraham the kids enter the house and despite seeing the carnage in front of them silently resolved to head upstairs and save their mom I'm done being a wolf boy it's time to be a wolf man they climb the stairs and marvel at the wicked awesome shining reference in front of them as well as that tethered twins acrobatics that's pretty good there hey Zorro why don't you show her your golf swing Zorro that's not how you make new friends Zora also fails to make friends with the other tethered twin named IO and who I think is Becca's mirror since she also beats her down with the club and then stabs her to death I know this is probably Supes traumatic for her but it's great to see a kid in a horror movie take charge and kick ass outside game makes his way onto Josh's brilliantly named Bo the biatch and hides well enough to frustrate texts into calling out for help from his Raptor friends although Gabe misses a flare gun shot he does end up beating texts to death off screen inside the redwood hall of the biatch inside the house Dalia is having a great time putting on makeup and making herself Purdy o to Purdy there now yeah you don't need to give yourself the same smile as your namesake Zora creeps in with her Golf Club but delivers a subpar sneak attack and Dalia ain't about to give her a mulligan tethered Peggy is just about to cut Zoras throat open when she stopped by Jason with a trophy smash and yeah that killed her don't act surprised the tethered aren't superhuman or anything they're American the Wilsons take a breather and turn on the news where they learned that they're not the only ones dealing with sewer people in jumpsuits shangkun people with scissors in fact on a live feed they see a ha shit are those a bunch of background bodies start the fucking purge counting engines I guess Bree and Zoran I'm sorry in the live news report they watch we see I think three bodies on the ground in front of a line of tethered folks holding hands in a giant link then the camera operator gets attacked and presumably killed so go ahead and call it for Eddie realizes that the tethered are taking their place as Americans and have been planning this for a long time so she decides that the Wilsons need to escape down to Mexico pronto they go to leave but when addy grabs the keys to Josh and Kitty's car she's attacked by the surviving tethered twin NICs who I think was Lindsey's counterpart and who had been knocked over the balcony earlier the still handcuffed daddy manages to grab some nearby scissors and win the fight by stabbing NICs with that I guess she nixed that little attack huh in any case not the best time for your son to walk in and see you with her parents injured and/or hancock Zora insists on driving and tries to convince her mom to let her with a pretty interesting argument I must say I have the high skill count in the family you don't have the highest kill count oh well perhaps I can be of assistance I do happen to be the expert so it's both twin wrong I just killed the second one yep that's exactly right guess you already knew that but did you know that I killed Katie yeah still that's oh that's one one one and two I killed two I killed myself I'm Josh so so wow you guys like don't even really need me huh they see ombré standing in the road and smiling at him so Zora goes to punch it Chewie but ombré just straight-up hops that hood and tries to stab at him through the sunroom she winds up on the windshield so Zora simply speeds the car up again and slams the brakes to fling her straight into the wood Eddie isn't content not knowing unbraced fate so she goes in after her and finds the tethered girl tethered to a frickin tree branch her daughter's doppelganger dies slowly giggling in distress as a DS somewhat compassionately rushes the girl to peace the Wilsons drive through the night and come morning well hi there just making my job a pain in the ass by passing three dead bodies in a car and five more strewn all about the street and various positions making eight total additions right now they round a corner and find their path blocked by their own station wagon wreathed in flame a fire wonder who could have started oh hey Pluto you wouldn't happen to know anything about this would you and the body next to that open car door anything about that little mister no alright scam and he grabs the fire poker and gets out of the car and in the process reveals three more bodies in the background behind her one on the ground and two slumped over together on a bench we see the two more clearly in a different shot later she approaches Pluto as he stands there snapping to the rhythm in his own head but just like with hombres she reaches out to him with compassion and even gets him to show her his face but Jason realizes it's a trap and that Pluto's a little schemer looking to Mad King burn them all inside the car so Jason gets out and defeats his feathered counterpart by stretching out his arms and walking backwards Pluto mimics his wolf man friend walking straight back into the fire although the tethered aren't bound to always mirror their surface counterparts we saw that Pluto had been mirroring Jason when they were playing in the closet earlier Jordan peel says the two characters have a higher synchronicity than the other pairs and that they were basically playing a game here even though it's one that leaves Pluto on the kill cap but Pluto also went along with this because he was the bait for Red's real plan all along which was to snatch Jason up and run away with them the Wilson family sees that Jason is gone and start to look for maybe they'll find him on the boardwalk and hope no Jason's just a bunch of crummy bodies not counted 12 so banks boardwalk for the cool dozen kills Andy then looks towards the shore and while other viewers get to marvel at the line of tethers bulb going into the sea I didn't even notice that at first because I was too busy counting the eight dead bodies out on the sand to properly appreciate that unsettling imagery thanks kill count I can't even look at cool shit because of you standing at Ground Zero of the world's biggest Red Rover line is the tethered guy that Jason saw earlier on the beach at that point he was already getting ready for his fellow tethered to arrive having been the first to kill his doppelganger the Bible verse dude which we saw when the Wilsons first arrived at the beach and of course all of this really goes back to the mere funhouse that Andy got lost in as a child it's there she returns to now in order to rescue her son she makes her way back to where she first saw her tethered self and opens a hidden bunny door into a boiler room of sorts she navigates deeper and deeper into the building and then into the earth taking staircases and escalators down down below until she finally finds herself in a tunnel with a billion bunnies scattered about oh yeah this movie did mention tunnels right at the beginning I guess that wasn't just a Snapple cap fun fact sorry Jordan should have trusted you oh and look there's the wall of bunny cages we had our opening credits a gags it's all coming together now honestly though I'm just happy we're down here with living bodies instead of topside with a bunch of dead but damage Sora why you got to be up here with all these dead bodies I see three kind of closest and then it gets blurry going back but a deleted scene has the same bodies in clear focus where I can count nine and finally there are four more lying near the tether chain I thought there were five at first but that thing's just a box so grand total of sixteen more between those two shots underground and he walks into a classroom and finds red at the chalkboard just the teach where her son is the red only responds by giving a D and the audience an enormous exposition doll it's probably the weakest point of the movie in my opinion over explaining itself a bit but the gist of what she says is that these tunnels were made for some kind of science experiment I believe they figured out how to make the plan didn't work and the tethered were abandoned although they were still tied to their counterparts on the surface doing everything they did only with a bit more imagination required but fate or God as red suggests brought Adi and her tethered self together for as Adi came down to the beach so her tethered version went up to the surface and eventually they met in the middle inside the funhouse of beer new stop thinking about you years later when both above and below ground Adi gave a particularly powerful dance performance the tethered audience watching down below chose the underground dancer as their leader she enacted a years-long plan to dress them all in jumpsuits and gloves and trained them to be a scissor wielding army of destruction and inspired by Hands Across America she knew exactly how they make their message loud and clear when they finally surface Adi and Redd begin a fight that becomes one of the best sequences of the film scored to a string arrangement of I got five on it [Music] and intercut with their dance duet that set them on this path to begin with it's a wonderful experience for both sight and sound it's also thematically interesting as the animalistic read avoids addy with graceful ease while Addie grows more and more wild as read continues to land stabs on her with the scissors read goes for a fatal overhead stab but is instead impaled in the midsection by Addie with her fire poker red falls to the ground and unlike with embraer pluto Addie has no compassion here instead she wraps her handcuffs around Reds neck and murders her and afterwards slips into some very tethered like vocal spasms Eddie takes a key from around Red's neck and frees herself from her handcuffs that finds Jason cowering in a locker huh kind of hard to tell if he's more afraid of having been kidnapped or being reunited with his grunting murdering mob they go back to the surface and join with Zora and Gabe and together the Wilsons leave the boardwalk in an ambulance never disturbing the tethered who stays strong in their chain of hand-holding everything seems to be relatively ok until Addie starts thinking back to her childhood when she put her hands around the real Addie's neck knocking her out so she could drag her unconscious body into the funhouse and down into the tunnels yeah dude as kids at his tethered version kidnapped her handcuffed her to a bed and stole her clothes so she could take her place which she did in the creepiest manner possible that means the Addie that went home with her parents that night was the tether daddy all the law and the character we knew as read was actually the original Addie who had a raspy voice from being strangled and who was eager to get revenge on her replacement using handcuffs but oh gee tether daddy won in the end having murdered the original auntie with those very same handcuffs although it does look like her son Jason may suspect that something's up there are actually some theories on mine that Jason was originally a tethered to I don't know how much I buy it but you can look them up and decide for yourself the movie ends with an amazing helicopter shop that soars over the landscape and shows just how successful the tethered have been it's an awesome shot especially since there are no dead bodies in sight for me to count we're too far away motherfuckers can't with this one how many people died is the tethered cut their way across the country let's find out and get to the numbers what what's a pata kill cow yeah I just kidding I'm not actually about to do that my my painstaking count 66 people died in us which is one more kill than the purge anarchy had best I could tell the victims included 14 men 14 women and 38 victims of unknown glory gender also eight of all of those skills were of the tethered so let's have this fancy pie chart Oh haven't seen that one before with a runtime of 126 minutes we had a kill on average every 1.91 minutes I'll give the golden chainsaw for coolest kill to IO who got the living daylights beat out of her literally by Zorro with a golf club like I said it's cool to see a kick-ass kid almost ready for lamest kill if I don't give it to any of the background bodies we'll go to text since it felt like a cheap cut away and that hilarious performance deserve to go out in a much better way and that's it US came out in 2019 and although it was a little more divisive than get out I think it solidifies Jordan Peele as a very welcome out tour in the horror genre until next time I'm James Agee nice this has been the kill count thanks a lot for watching this Gil Cal I want to thank universal entertainment for sending me the movie as well as some of the goodies back there I think the cut out paper people is perfect for this and they sent a candy apple most importantly they sent those golden scissors which I'm very excited to have I also want to thank some patrons like Christian we're sink Donnie neo chickies sake Michael Zielinski Daniel DeLuca Zion Sutherland and Church thanks everyone be good people

Channel: undefined

Views: 9,246,329

Rating: 4.9405842 out of 5

Keywords: clone, blumhouse, nyong'o, body count, dead meat, jaj, doppelganger, get out, movies, winston duke, kill count, evan alex, funhouse, i got 5 on it, pine commander boogie, santa cruz, films, shahadi wright jospeh, tim and eric, luniz, boardwalk, elizabeth moss, elisabeth moss, james a. janisse, jason blum, us, DMKC, scary, tim heidecker, hands across america, mirror, jordan peele, killer, lupita, n'yongo, horror

Id: I9ji5jAjtnA

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BlamefulWorm435]

Anyone have an suggestions for what James's tether would be named?

[u/ShiftyBea]

It's technically the fourth Sunday Kill Count. Mordeo, Happy Death Day 2 U, Terrifier and this.

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Comments under the Jaws video- "You didn't count the dog!!!!" and "Do a video on Us!!!"

Comments under the Us video- "You didn't count all of America" and "Where's Jaws 2??????"

[u/realise2056]

That "Firefly Fun house" reverence caught me off gaurd.

[u/kirant]

You know, the biggest question I had after this video was what effects went into Tethered James. It caught me off guard how different he looked compared to the narrator James we had for the rest of the video.

By my guess:

• The video was produced prior to some of the other episodes (I assume before Jaws?), leading to having a beard.

• The hair looks pretty similar to having just jumped in a shower and jumping out (or just washed out any hair product)...I've done something similar after a long day, leading to awkward video calls.

• The bags under his eyes are throwing me. I'd say make up, but I'm not sure if this is possible with make up. But man, Tethered James looks like he stayed up 40 hours straight to film this.

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Either way, fantastic movie and I hope this locks in Jordan Peele for further movies. In my opinion, he has done well as a writer, director, and producer, bringing a unique tone and perspective to most of the films he has high levels of control over. Auteurs (is that even the plural of auteur?) in games and films tend to produce my favourite work...so I might be a bit bias.