Sometimes some movies are unrighteously bashed and hated. But while this is far from the most terrible genre movie that I have ever seen, I can still totally understand why lots of people are hating on this movie.
It of course really isn't anything too uncommon for a horror movie to have a sort of slower first half. It gives the movie plenty of time and room to set up its story and introduce its characters to the viewers and start working on setting up its mystery and tension. This movie has a slower first half as well but with as a big difference that it isn't really setting up its story, or has any good character development in it. It's constantly building up but never toward anything all that interesting, tense or ultimately very rewarding.
And it's not like this movie is getting any better once its horror starts to kick in. To be perfectly honest, I still prefer the slower and not so very exciting first half of the movie, over the horror cliché filled second half. In the second half, I don't really know what's going on anymore, simply because I didn't care about any of it. This really also was because of the extremely poor character development and storytelling of the movie.
It's actually shocking how poorly this movie handles all of its characters. It never feels like you get to know any of the characters and it keeps on changing its focus. The first half of the movie still pretty much focuses on the adults of the family, while the second half is just about its younger characters and for some odd reason forgets all about its earlier introduced characters and adults, that all seemed important to the movie its story, in the first and better half of the movie.The movie basically has no idea how to approach its story and handle all of the horror ingredients. Seems to me that director Anthony Leonardi III had seen a bunch of modern horror flicks and thought it would be enough to feature a mysterious atmosphere in it, in which characters look and stare at each other ominously and talk to each other in vague terms, in an attempt to create mystery and tension. Other than that, there are no scares, no gore, no real killings and just a girl painted white with black eyes, all courtesy of some CGI effects. In other words; really not enough to call this a very good or effective horror movie. I'm somewhat reluctant to even call this a horror movie, since the approach and eventual end product are really far from what I consider to be horror.
Still, I just can't say that this movie is an absolutely terrible one as well. It's still good looking all and the acting really isn't all that bad either. No big surprise, seeing how Anne Heche and Clancy Brown are in it. And despite the fact that there isn't all that much happening or developing in this movie, it never feels like a boring one as well. The storytelling was a bit messy at parts and it didn't ever really explained anything properly enough but it never got offensively bad or silly with anything.
There seriously are far more worse modern genre movies out there but having said that; this clearly isn't one that's amongst the best or most effective ones either.
4/10
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