Rather awful, it was. It had a decent ending (sort of) and a rather good switch towards the end when you understand some important stuff, but the rest was awful. The fact that during the movie you never see the evil creature terrorising them kinda have a reason that you understand at the end, but that doesn’t erase the fact that never seeing it instead of augmenting the tension it sort of makes it dull, also the distorted way the creature sees things is not really well done, and the way they try to create tension by flashing the light on and off is very much annoying, almost in an epileptic sort of way. It’s not scary at all, only annoying.
Now, I’m not a big fan of horror movies, and I don’t much like gore splatter scenes, but I do sometimes enjoy scary films, thrillers and such, therefore I’m not commenting on the gory details (personally I don’t think they were very well done, but I’m not the expert; fact remains, I didn’t like them), but this movie was not particularly scary, especially if you’re not a kid anymore - and by that I mean that having had more years of time to fill, I have seen more things now that I had when I was like 13, and so this movie is really nothing new and nothing good. It might have scared me then, maybe, but surely not now.
I didn’t like how it was filmed, I didn’t like the annoying flashes, the things briefly shown in the dark that I had no idea what they were, I didn’t like most of the dialogues…
the characters were not likeable, I don’t think anyone wrote them to be likeable to be honest, they were just there for numbers.
The acting: The girls do what they have to do, they are ok, right for this kind of movie. The boys… sigh, they were all rather dull or annoying, maybe Gadiot wasn’t all bad, I mean, was I supposed to despise his character from first glance to the end?
I was disappointed that they killed off Felton’s character right away, I wanted to see him acting a bit instead I only saw him play the stupid kid like the others at the beginning, and then Gary died right away.
Lynch looked alright as the shady beast catcher, I would have wanted a little bit more though, it was all very anti-climatic.
The story is simple: Sarah comes back to her British home after some months working in the states, and finds out that her mom is out probably having an affair, they have money problems and the big house seems almost abandoned, and her stepbrothers are idiots who even got their 13yo brother stoned. Stephen now is with Emily who I think was with Doug before, maybe, who cares really, they spend a few minutes being silly stoned boys then the lights go out because there’s a storm outside so they go back inside the house. Gary goes alone to look for some candles, the others go upstairs, and here it starts: there’s some kind of beast inside tearing people apart and they try to stay alive… doing quite a poor job at it.
Why when they see that there’s a blood trail on the floor, not yet knowing about any beast, do they walk so slowly, like on eggshells? As far as they know at that point there’s nobody else in the house, only their father (stepfather only to Sarah, I believe) so, aren’t they worried about the blood? Concerned that their father might be badly hurt, wanting to help him??? They walk as if they were expecting what they found (his father torn apart on the bed), which is absurd.
Only after they see the man’s mangled body they hear the beast and close the door; they hear Gary’s yell of What the hell is going on, after he found the dog’s mangled corpse, and then nothing more from him, the beast got him.
The others lock themselves in a bathroom and then under the roof, and plan to wait there for someone to rescue them, only not one of them has a cellphone with them (really, Stephen’s doesn’t work and not one of the others has theirs…) and Sarah is worried about the little one that they left sleeping in the barn… so they have to do something.
Sarah tries to attract the beast’s attention while one brother calls for help, but the beasts apparently wasn’t fooled and turned around and went for him instead.
One father and two brothers down. And one dog.
They fight and argue some more, then Emily gets mad at her boyfriend, with reason, since he left her alone and ran away at the first sign of trouble. He ran as soon as he got the weapon (they call it both gun and shotgun, I thought it was a rifle, I don’t know, one of those they use when they go hunting) but she got the bullets; it was quite the scene, she was totally right in her rage - although I don’t see the meaning of it all, the dialogues are so meaningless here, why did she think that sleeping with Sarah’s brother would be ‘getting back at her’? she was probably upset that Sarah left for the States and only sent an email in maybe eight months, but why would this upset her? Stephen also maybe did it for that same reason, and again why? I don’t get these people.
Anyway, in a poorly filmed way we see that all of a sudden she seems to have slippery socks on her feet, so she falls down and shoots herself dead. Stephen laughs showing he’s already losing his mind, kind of stopping the audience who laughed as well, but him laughing is not funny anymore.
We are now at one dog, one stepfather, two stepbrothers and a friend down.
Sarah wants to get out of there and they get on the roof. They see a police car: a policeman who brought a beast-catcher along, and again it was really poorly done in my opinion. Very slowly the policeman enters the house and then we see McRae getting his stuff, he turns and sees the man dead, and gets killed himself right away, they barely arrived and are already corpse on the ground.
The kid entered the house after waking up and managed to reach them and get on the roof with them without troubles - other than seeing Gary’s body, that is, but with all the yelling he did it’s quite absurd that he wasn’t caught as well.
Sarah hopes to escape in the police car but she has no keys, so they hide in the barn again. Sarah saw her mom’s wallet in the police car, and now Stephen tells her that he did something to the car so that she could not go to her fancy lover who she apparently spent so much money on, and Sarah thinks, and tells him, that by doing so he caused her death. Stephen hits her then runs out and is caught right away. Good.
Now it’s: one dog, one stepfather, three stepbrothers, a friend and two men down.
Sarah shows sign of being infected and tells them to run away. The 13yo hides in her car now that he found the keys, while Sarah battles with the first beast, and then she bites the last stepbrother.
Dawn breaks and with the sun Sarah wakes up naked on the piano, and sees the deaths all around, and sees that the beast was her mother, so she takes the car and drives her little brother away, to the only safe place she knows of, and here we realise that their mom was not having an affair, she did not pay rent for a fancy lover but she kept a safe place where she could hide where she needed to transform…
which is when, exactly? every night, every time there is a storm? Who knows.
The very last scene, we see Gary sort of coughing, making it look like he’s not really dead… she didn’t check, did she? She just assumed they were all dead and went away…
Sarah - Isabella Calthorpe
Gary - Tom Felton
Emily - Gemma Atkinson
Doug - Josh Bowman
Stephen - Peter Gadiot
McRae - John Lynch
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento