When the lights came back up after my screening of the new Blumhouse horror movie ‘M3GAN,’ I turned to my friend Evelyn to get her thoughts. 

“Overall, 6 out of 10,” she said. “It’s more of a funny weird movie than being scary.” There was another couple nearby, so I asked them, too. They couldn’t agree on whether ‘M3GAN’ was funny or scary. 

‘M3GAN’ certainly got mixed responses from those who watched it with me, and I am as mixed about this movie as they were.

A good amount of laughter in the theater is not exactly what we’ve come to expect from a Blumhouse movie. We expect more than just a comedy with a few jump scares, not just spending our time waiting for it to get scary. When the movie ended I was surprised. I thought that’s when it was finally going to get exciting.

‘M3GAN’ is about a broken-hearted kid who gets cheered up by a playful, fun, smart android robot doll that switches into a killing machine. Eight-year old Cady (Violet McGraw) goes to live with her young aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) after her parents are killed in a terrible car accident. Gemma’s a robotic engineer, responsible for creating kids’ toys, not handling a kid. It’s not until Cady shows interest in a robot Gemma made in college, that pushes Gemma to finish working on an android friend to help support her grieving niece. The result is M3GAN, who becomes far more than a doll; she’s family.  

From this description, ‘M3GAN’ sounds like a really good scary movie. I mean, we’ve got a killer robot and traumatized kids. But as I watched it, there was more laughter than breath holding from the crowd. People really responded with laughs at M3GAN’s reactions in a lot of scenes, which were somewhat unpredictable, but reasonable.

And then there’s the dancing. Anyone who’s seen the trailer for this movie, or been on TikTok as of late knows all about the dancing. Who wouldn’t laugh? But even then, the results were mixed. Evelyn said she would be freaked out by that robot dancing in front of her.