Archives: Movie Reviews

Ok, so, interesting.

This is not a very good movie. A young girl, whose twin sister drowned while they were playing as a child and she hallucinated Udo Kier beckoning her towards a strange portal while her parents wailed, comes back as a young woman to party with her friends and visit the house. Halfway through, she switches to a fantasy world where she learns her sister may still be trapped, and encounters phantasmagorical visions of people she knows as she wanders a desert and tries to free her.

It's visually well-made, reminiscent of if Guillermo Del Toro tried to retell "Alice In Wonderland" as the sort of disturbingly off-kilter film Udo Kier might star in. It uses a very classic, '40s or '50s style orchestral score, and once it gets going—which takes a long time—there's a lot of really beautiful costumes, masked characters, etc. In fact, on that…

I threw this on to have some background noise while working—any horror movie about a ventriloqist dummy is almost certainly going to be a dud, it's too easy a macguffin—but I was quickly surprised to see the magic words in the credits: "Directed by James Wan". Wan has a real talent for horror direction. I'm not actually a big fan of "Saw", the movie that made him, and it wasn't until the one after this one, "Insidious", that he really won me over, but still, like all his movies, this one has its isolated moments, including an appropriately gory and basically totally unexpected denouement. Probably Wan's worst movie, not even really worth a re-watch except for the occasional odd Wan touches, which this movie probably has fewer of than any of his others, but, nonetheless, at this point I'm resigned to likely watch every one of his movies at some…

Ambitious but ultimately unfulfilling sci-fi flavored flick both spends too long just being an ordinary captivity/pursuit flick and gets too baroque at the same time. A pair of scientists looking for a researcher's camp in the woods during a pandemic are attacked by unseen assailants, then rescued by a hermit who turns out to be trying to hold them prisoner at his camp to subject to some sort of magickal ritual. After much too long they escape, and find his ex-wife at her nearby camp, who is doing some sort of science experiments trying to communicate with some sort of forest entity through lights and sound. There's a psychedelic mushroom spore fog and attacks from the hermit, punctuated by a long montage of "Altered States"-style video effects before the whole thing abruptly ends. Meh.