Wednesday, October 31, 2018
October Horror Challenge 2018 #101: "The Amazing Mr. X"
I think this movie was trying to be a film noir, but it kinda stumbled and failed. It's a shame too, because it had some ok ideas and it could have been better if about 30 minutes of boring filler crap had been cut out. Movies like this always seem to mistake long shots of people staring as poignant or artful when they're really just annoying.
In this movie, two sisters live together in a creepy old house by the sea. One sister used to live in the house with her husband until he disappeared at sea and is presumed dead, and now she can't seem to let go of his memory even though she has a new man in her life. She seeks help from a psychic, and soon both sisters are captivated by the psychic, while the new boyfriend tries to prove the psychic is a fraud.
The seaside setting is actually really beautiful and spooky, and the crows that keep popping up are good little providers of jump scares and a sense of foreboding, since crows are supposed to be harbingers of death. Like I said, this movie could have been good with some serious tweaking, because I like the idea and it works.
The acting isn't great, but it's not terrible either, and the plot was twisty and morbid, even if the twists weren't terribly hard to figure out. It's mostly the long pauses and staring into nothing that ruin this one. I wanted to scream at my TV screen for them to get on with it, which isn't what you want to be doing for your horror movie. It ends up being too slow and plodding to be worth checking out. Maybe they'll remake it someday and fix all the errors. Or you can just watch "Des Dioboliques" or "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" instead, since they handled similar ideas much better.
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