The hook for Christopher Landon’s Freaky is so instantly appealing that it’s sort of shocking no one has tried it before: It’s a cross between Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th, combining the comedic body-switching genre with a slasher movie while cleverly nodding at the conventions of both. Landon has proved adept at mixing horror and comedy with his Happy Death Day movies, and while Freaky isn’t as giddily entertaining as those two films, it’s still plenty of fun to watch.

Emulating their slasher influences, Landon and co-writer Michael Kennedy start with a cold open featuring a bunch of disposable teens who are all about to die, sitting around a campfire telling the vaguely defined legend of the killer known as the Blissfield Butcher. As the teens go their separate ways to get drunk and/or have sex, a hulking figure dressed all in black and wearing a mask starts picking them off, one by one. The Butcher (Vince Vaughn) is quite a creative killer, using a wine bottle and a toilet lid, among other implements, to dispatch his victims.

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The next day, news of the murders has spread throughout the idyllic (and deliberately nonspecific) town of Blissfield, but the local teens aren’t taking it that seriously. That includes shy Millie (Kathryn Newton) and her best friends Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich), even thought Millie’s older sister is one of the cops hunting for the killer. So Millie isn’t worried when she’s alone at school after the homecoming football game (she dons a beaver costume as the school mascot), waiting for her unreliable mom (Katie Finneran) to come pick her up.

Celeste O'Connor, Vince Vaughn) and Misha Osherovich in Freaky

Instead, she encounters the Butcher, now wielding an ancient mystical knife that he picked up at the site of his previous killing spree, the home of a collector of rare artifacts. Some strange supernatural visions appear as the Butcher stabs Millie with the knife, and instead of killing her, he finds himself injured in the same exact place where he stabbed Millie. Millie’s sister comes to her rescue, and the Butcher runs off. The next day (Friday the 13th, of course), Millie and the Butcher awake to discover that they’ve switched bodies.

It’s an efficient and clear set-up, although the movie’s brisk pacing leaves little room for exploring back story or mythology. Stuck in the ungainly body of a man wanted for murder, Millie panics and hides, while trying to convince her friends that it’s really her, and not a homicidal maniac, wearing the weathered face of this middle-aged man. Meanwhile, the Butcher takes advantage of Millie’s unobtrusiveness, resuming his murderous ways while attending school as Millie. There’s a bit of goofy comedy as the characters adjust to being in very different bodies, but the humor is surprisingly sensitive, especially about gender issues. This isn’t, as some social media posts joked when the first trailers appeared, a horror-movie version of the Rob Schneider comedy The Hot Chick.

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Vaughn embraces his role as a teenage girl, but he doesn’t exaggerate Millie’s mannerisms or turn into a caricature of femininity, even when he performs a cheerleading routine to convince Millie’s friends it’s really her. Millie remains a fully rounded character, regardless of what body she’s in, while the Butcher remains almost entirely a cipher, never even given a proper name, let alone a motivation or background. That means that Newton spends a lot of the movie as just a menacing background presence, and while she convincingly switches from meek teenage girl to psychopathic predator, she doesn’t get the same showcase as Vaughn.

In addition to the comedy, that showcase includes a few serious emotional moments for Vaughn -- between Millie and her mother and between Millie and her crush Booker (Uriah Shelton) -- that are refreshingly heartfelt, even if they also feel a bit rushed. Millie’s long standing crush on Booker, a star athlete who spends most of the movie wearing a letterman jacket, is another stock teen-movie element that the filmmakers knowingly include, although they don’t have a particularly subversive take on it.

Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton in Freaky

Still, it’s a sweet relationship, as is Millie’s family dynamic, as she and her sister and mother are still mourning the loss of Millie’s father a year earlier. Landon pulled on some of these same emotional threads in the Happy Death Day movies, and here he lacks a performer like Jessica Rothe, whose energy and charisma carried those movies through their logical inconsistencies and sometimes shaky plotting. Without that dazzling central performance, Freaky occasionally loses its focus in its under-plotted narrative.

Most viewers will be too entertained to care too much about the plot holes or cheap fake-outs, though, and Landon takes advantage of the R rating to throw in plenty of nasty gore for horror fans. Freaky isn’t ever scary, and it’s not even all that suspenseful, but at least the Butcher’s murders are suitably gruesome, and most of his victims once he’s in Millie’s body are the kind of high school creeps who probably deserve what they get.

With a 24-hour ticking clock before the main characters are stuck in each other’s bodies forever, Freaky proceeds swiftly and predictably toward its end goal. Landon has developed a lively visual style over his last few movies, and Freaky is colorful and boisterous, even if its pleasures quickly fade (at least until the inevitable sequel).

Starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Celeste O’Connor, Misha Osherovich, Katie Finneran, Uriah Shelton, Dana Drori and Alan Ruck, Freaky opens Friday, Nov. 13 in theaters nationwide.

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