Film Review: Milk & Serial

Milk & Serial
Director: Curry Barker
Bad Idea
Streaming on YouTube: 08.09

If you’re chronically online (like I am) and often find yourself lost amongst the Letterboxd-type lot, you might’ve seen some recent buzz surrounding a certain indie release that not only had a budget of $800 and was released for free on YouTube, but might also be the horror sleeper hit of the summer. Popping up on Reddit feeds and a smattering of other online film forums of the like, Milk & Serial has been the talk of the online horror community since its release three weeks ago and I can confidently say, in my humble SLUG Contributing Writer opinion, that it lives up to the hype.  

Milk & Serial follows your stereotypical bro-y content creators—think the internet’s favorite problematic darlings like the Paul Brothers or Sam Pepper during the 2014 YouTube prank frenzy era. With God-awful nicknames like “Milk” and “Seven,” the two run a prank-style YouTube channel and, in true obnoxious online prank content fashion, the two compete in an unspoken pissing contest to constantly one-up each other’s previous antics. Seven (Cooper Tomlinson, Warnings, Enigma) goes as far as to buy blanks from a shady arms dealer to trick Milk (Curry Barker, The Chair, Warnings) into thinking that one of his friends is shot and killed during Milk’s birthday party. This takes place within 10 minutes of the film’s 62-minute runtime and isn’t even the wildest part of Barker’s prank-filled train ride to Hell. Things only devolve from there as Milk’s act of revenge on Seven takes an absolute turn for the worst. 

The film is written, directed and shot by Barker, an L.A. comedian, and produced by Barker’s frequent collaborator, and co-founder of his sketch comedy channel That’s a Bad Idea. The two are a match made in nightmare-fueled heaven. Over the seven years that Barker and Tomlinson have been producing comedy content, they’ve snuck in a handful of killer award winning psychological horror shorts here and there. Not only is Milk & Serial an excellent indie exercise by Barker and Tomlinson in the found footage horror genre, it also has some well-timed comedic moments. Remember back in 2017 when Jordan Peele’s Get Out sparked conversations around how comedians make some of the best horror writers? Barker and Tomlinson reinforce this idea and once again prove that comedy and horror share a sort of haunting liminal space together where timing is everything when it comes to telling your story and scaring your audience effectively. 

Milk & Serial isn’t the most beautifully shot in comparison to Barker’s previous efforts like Warnings or The Chair (which I highly recommend watching after reading this as Warnings has some eerily disturbing sequences that have haunted me since my initial viewing), nor is it as supernaturally psychological. Without giving too much of the film’s actual plot away, Barker uses the Chekhov’s Gun technique, which most modern film lovers know from Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb analogy, to get audience members invested into his plot. It’s masterfully executed for a feature debut and will have you shouting at certain characters on your TV. You’re given high stakes in Barker’s fucked-up game. The film also has, as mentioned before, perfectly delivered comedic moments with very quote-worthy dialogue like, “Life’s unfair… you’re unlucky.”

This film is not one to miss if you’re a horror nerd with an affinity for found footage, and you have no excuse to. Barker and Tomlinson are just the beginning of the wave of feature films we’re about to see from prominent members of the online horror community, as creators like Chris Stuckmann and Kane Pixel have both been approached by big studios to adapt their online material they’ve both shared for free on YouTube for years. God bless the little weirdos of the internet and the art they share with us. Whatever Barker and Tomlinson get up to next, I know I’ll be along for the unnerving ride. –Yonni Uribe

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