Freaky

Christopher Landon is cornering the market on high-concept horror/comedies.

Having already delivered two extremely fun and funny Happy Death Day movies, the filmmaker brings his witty humor, sure-handed direction, and expert jump-scare timing to Freaky, a bloody and thoroughly entertaining body-swap thriller.

Co-written with Michael Kennedy, the film opens with a breathless sequence that introduces the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn) via creative deaths, executed with crafty suspense and gallows humor. The killer’s grisly talents firmly established, the focus nimbly shifts to high school outcast Millie (Kathryn Newton, Big Little Lies) and her friends (Celeste O’Connor, Selah and the Spades) and Josh (Misha Osherovich, The Goldfinch).

Landon gratefully doesn’t keep viewers waiting long before these two parties’ paths inevitably cross, during which the Butcher stabs Millie with an ancient mystical dagger that identically wounds both of them and, at the stroke of Friday the 13th, causes both of them to come down with a case of the Freaky Fridays.

Waking up to their bizarre new situations, Newton is terrific channeling the Butcher’s psychotic tendencies, which Millie’s frazzled mom Paula (Katie Finneran, Bloodline) and cop sister Ginny (Kelly Lamor Wilson, Mrs. Fletcher) comically evade and write off to PTSD.

Vaughn, however, is even better as Millie. Basically playing a semi-flamboyant gay man, he channels teenage angst with ease and earns steady laughs from the mismatch of his large adult male appearance and insecure teen girl actions.

Thanks to convenient search engine research, the friends learn that Millie must stab her hijacked body with the blade before 24 hours has elapsed, lest she be stuck in the wrong host — a fairly uninspired supernatural explanation that nevertheless keeps the pace active.

Heartstring-tugging via the lingering effects of Millie’s deceased father a year after his passing is also fairly basic, as is her dynamic with nice-guy jock crush Booker (Uriah Shelton, Girl Meets World), though both arcs are subverted just enough to not feel cloying and also keep the film’s extreme violence from tipping the tone into excessively bleak territory.

But, really, Freaky is all about the specialized amusement derived from seeing Vaughn act like a high school girl and Newton get her serial murderer on, plus the imaginative carnage that occurs on the way to the co-leads’ big showdown. On those levels, the film is a massive success.

Grade: B. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10 and Carolina Cinemark

(Photo: Universal Pictures)