It's hard to tell sometimes with Amazon if it's recommending movies to me because they're good, or because they're like "hey this movie sucks ass, and you have terrible taste in movies, so you should watch this!" Just because I tend to like movies other people think are horrible doesn't mean I want them throwing all their lowest rated movies at me. Last year that ended with me watching some really awful movies. Sometimes it's hard to balance having a genuine love of horror movies that allowed me to find something to enjoy in most horror movies and me not wanting to waste my time. I guess there's no way to do that without watching lots of movies and hoping for the best. Here goes nothing.
So this is a low-budget ghost story about a lonely little girl who has an imaginary friend named Bethany who might not be so imaginary. We fast forward a bit and the little girl is all grown up, inhwriting her childhood home after her mother dies. Turns out her mom was abusive, and she's terrified of becoming her mother, and she's afraid that's what will happen, but she and her husband are struggling financially, so they don't have much of a choice but to move into the old house. Of course things go horribly wrong (when do they ever go right in movies like this?)
There's nothing new about this plot, but old stories can still be good if they're well-told. The actress playing Claire is good at what she does. Given her haunted memories mixing past with present in her mind, it's hard to tell whether creepy things are really happening or if it's just in her head. I'm not a huge fan of her husband, he's kind of a jerk and I don't think he's as supportive as he should be (she's reliving a nightmare every day living in that house dude, of course she's acting weird) but I guess the actor does an ok job. Shannen Doherty plays Claire's mom in the flashbacks, and she does a pretty good job with the character too. She was creepy and I hated her like I was supposed to. The actress who plays childhood Claire isn't that great though, so I cringed a little whenever she was onscreen.
So like I said, this movie doesn't tread any new ground, and it really frustrated me how the characters react. Especially the husband. I guess I can understand it, but it's still annoying. I also wish Claire had tried harder to communicate how terrible her mother was. I have a hard time believing that her husband knew what happened to her in that house and still insisted she live there and act all normal about it. I guess I don't have much patience for characters being douchebags and refusing to communicate with each other. It makes this movie more of a treatise on why you should never get married than a scary ghost story.
Plus once the twist is revealed (and it's not much of a twist, because I figured it out right away) the movie gets much worse. There are some huge plot holes big enough to drive several trucks through, some bad special effects, and some characters doing really dumb things. I really don't think the people who wrote this script know much about medical records or laws regarding childcare, because they take some big leaps in logic here and it would have pulled me out of the story if I'd still been invested in the story at that point. I really wanted to like this movie, and I think the filmmakers could have told a good story here, but it looks like they just got lazy instead. Poo.
No comments:
Post a Comment