This is a movie review... I will not outright spoil things, but if you want to really experience a movie fresh and clean, there is information below that will dirty you up! So beware of mild semi-spoilers.
Synopsis: A girl's body is found after she has been missing for a while. Her parents are sad. They split up, then years later, her mom gets a phone call from the supposedly dead daughter. She begins to investigate what that means. Weird jump cuts ensue.
Scariness Type: There is some nasty torture in this movie. Most of it is just people walking around and talking, but just a few times in the movie, very very horrible torture is performed on people.
Rating: 2/5 Leg Braces.
Good Stuff: This is one of those movies where the heroes are following a trail of clues, solving more and more of a puzzle. So that's interesting.
Bad Stuff: But in the end, you don't really know anything until the last 3 minutes (literally) of the movie, during which everything is revealed and it concludes, and does so in a way I don't really like, including one villain that looks like Jim Carrey doing his Maskiest mugging. It felt kind of like I just wasted two hours if that's how it's gonna turn out. It's sort of like when a movie ends with "it was all a dream!" That's not the case here, but it feels like the same kind of slap in your face, Nelson Ha-Ha, you wasted your time watching this. A lack of arc, perhaps? A lack of redemption? I don't know exactly. It's quite the horror trope to have a movie end in some variation of "failure", and usually that's okay with me, but here it didn't feel right.
To contradict what I said in an earlier review, this also shows the trouble with adapting from a more complex source (a novel). The movie sort of skips along to somewhat random events, just to squeeze in a lot of different stuff and subplots into a movie length. There are characters that just appear and start being a part of the story out of the blue. In the end, all these things tie together (and it's all pretty simple too, which isn't really a plus), but I felt really off-kilter along the way, always wondering why this or that new thing was happening.
One last bad thing: When transitioning between scenes, for no reason at all, it will flash in random shots of things to be creepy. Like there's a girl (presumably the daughter) stuttering back and forth like broken film. Or in one scene, it's less random - a badguy is talking about how they've caught somebody in their web of deception and it keeps cutting to quarter-second-long shots of a spider crawling on a web. Yeah, on the nose again. It doesn't add anything, and it's quite obnoxious.
Classic Rules of Film: If you say your husband has disappeared in Act 1, he's probably going to turn up sometime in Act 3.
My Take: Simply put, not worth watching. I thought it was going somewhere pretty interesting as it went along, and then it failed me at the end. Man, after all that build-up of the movie not being able to play all month, and this is what I end up with?
Artistic Nonsense: Guys, it's
not artistic to insert random jump cuts between scenes. It's just stupid.
Our second to last movie is next!
The Last Lovecraft: Relic Of Cthulhu is a comedy. Let's hope it's a funny one!
And just to get you in the Halloween mood and all prepped for Halloween night, I'm going to tell you what our Halloween movie is to watch on Halloween, so on Halloween you should put it in and watch
Halloween: H2O with me for a Halloween treat, so we can have a Halloween discussion about it! How could I resist that option? I've actually never seen an entire Halloween movie, except for
Season of the Witch (Halloween 3?), twice, which was hilarious and didn't include Michael Myers at all. Or any witches. I'm assuming this will be really stupid as well. I'd probably rather have watched an old one, like perhaps the original, but they only had this one and the sequel to it on Netflix. I'm sure I'll miss all the clever references to the old movies, but oh well. Streamers can't be choosers.
