SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This is a story about pro wrestlers pummeling each other... Or so you would think when you see that it's produced by WWE Entertainment! In fact, it's actually the story of a non-wrestling man whose non-wrestling wife has died recently, so he's having to take his non-wrestling kids on a trip to the cabin (yep, trip to a remote cabin!) his wife had wanted them to go to before she died, all by himself. It's stressful and depressing, and none of them are too in the mood for fun. Lucky for them, horrible (non-wrestling!) evils lurk in the darkness, so they don't have to worry about fun! No wrestling ensues.
This is one of those depressing horror movies, more sad than scary. It's loaded up with cheap false jump scares, like the classic scene of somebody stepping through the door suddenly along with a shriek of violins when they turn out to just be somebody who is supposed to be there, and who you should've heard coming rather than being surprised by. When it gets down to the actual scares, it's alright... there's something mysterious stalking this house, and they end up going back and forth trying to decide if they need to get out or "Barricade"(tm) themselves inside the house to be safe.
Big spoiler alert, it's time to reveal the big twist! There's not much to this movie other than the twist - the family goes to the cabin, they are sad, everything seems weird, time skips, people act strangely. There's a lot of fairly pointless action, repeated times where he has to search the house for his suddenly missing kids again and again... and then the twist is that the father had a high fever messing with his head for most of the movie (an absurdly short incubation time, by the way - he contracted it from the guy they met a couple hours earlier). So all the weird stuff either didn't happen, or was things he did while feverish, and then didn't recognize he had done later. It all makes sense in the end, as they flashback through it (not to too much excess, thankfully), and you see what
really happened, which is that he mostly did all the right things to save his kids from this disease, he just didn't know he had done them. So that's pretty good.
It was an interesting and semi-original twist, a different form of "it was all a dream" that could actually happen. Although the one thing I found really odd was the way the sheriff, who the father tied up and stuffed in the attic while insane, reacted to it all. I couldn't quite understand it. He seemed pretty cool with having been kidnapped in the end, although then he adds, "He'll get what he has coming..." ominously, which makes him seem quite the opposite of cool with it. It was strange.
In the end, this is probably going to be the record low body count for the month: 1 death. And it earns an acceptable
3 out of 5 Monster Nails. Not the greatest movie ever, but it works.
This movie inspired me to draw a barricaded front door, because that's something in the movie. Plus I wanted to nail it shut because until they actually
did nail it shut in the movie, they left that thing open
way too much! It drove me insane that in a snowstorm, he'd run outside and leave the door open. Was he raised in a barn?
