Ok, here’s another movie that I kind of liked that I’m 100% positive everybody else will hate. In fact, for about the first half, I really liked it, but it kind of blew it.
A young boy, maybe 10 or 12, wants to face his fears and goes camping in the woods where his younger sister disappeared two years earlier. Sitting in his tent, he starts to hear weird things.
And for the first half, that’s the whole movie. A kid hiding in a tent with weird noises outside. And, you know what? It was sort of creepy. It built a mood and played effectively off my own fear of the dark. (Have I ever mentioned my phobia? Well, I’m not exactly afraid of the dark, it’s a little wierder than that, but close enough.) I have in incredibly hard time being in darkened woods, and I especially don’t like being in a tent by myself, when I can’t see around me and am in the tactically least defensible position if anything happens, and my senses sharpen and I become aware of every.damn.sound. And as this movie slowly ratcheted up the weirdness, it really evoked that, and despite having basically no plot, I liked it for the mood.
I should say, I liked the Blair Witch Project for similar reasons: because it’s a horror movie entirely about sound. You never see anything, only ever heard things. This plays that up well.
Unfortunately, as the movie goes on, it gets a little more just weird and less creepy. Weirdness is interrupted by the boy waking up as if it was just a dream, which is cheap. His sister appears, and he takes it for granted. The sounds and soon lights get weirder, and he ventures out to explore, and apparently finds his childhood home, which appears to be inhabited by… something? None of it is ever explained, it’s just weirdness after weirdness. And soon, the videocam he’s been using as a flashlight becomes the camera, for some reason he’s watching everything through the camera, and it slips in and out of being a first-person-shooter, with all the tedious cliches like him still holding the camera as he runs from half-seen things that appear onscreen in with a brief flash of static and an unexplained metallic screetching noise. And it all drags on a little too long with a little too much sense and it’s not creepy anymore.
Which is a damn shame. Because for the first half, this really looked like one of those movies I would like that everybody else hated, and I always like finding those.
If they hadn’t blown it by the end, I would have said it’s definitely interesting, if not necessarily good. It really was shaping up to be. It’s too bad.
You want to see some bad IMDB reviews, by the way, look this thing up. It has a string some of of the worst user reviews I’ve ever seen. Even though I didn’t wind up liking it as much as I’d hoped, I liked it better than *that*.