Post by George Willson on Apr 14, 2006 22:35:10 GMT -5
One of Entertainment Weekly's 25 scariest movies of all time fell rather flat in my opinion. I watch movies fo substance, character, plot, and other things beyond just the visuals. This film had a paper thin plot, which is fine, since the suspense was the point of the film, anyway.
When it comes to the characters, they were mostly cardboard cutouts, none of which showing any real character beyond their purpose in the film: get killed. They performed my number one horror pet peeve: knocking senselessly on a door asking if someone is home and then just walking in when no one answers and the door is open. Seriously, who does this? This film features no less than three of these imbecils, and being Texas, they were all killed, probably for breaking and entering. I barely knew their names, much less enough about them to care that they just got hacked to death. I know it's supposed to be the human element, and I will grant the suspense in these sections was done very well, but I already booed it because they didn't belong in that house to begin with.
The final third of the film featured the heroine and only survivor screaming in a chair she was tied to at the dining room table. I know she was sitting on a corpse, but she screamed pretty randomly, so I wasn't sure if there was something going on behind her or not. Maybe she was just screaming because of the bizarre and disturbing situation.
The draw of this film for the gore hounds of the world comes down to its severely disturbing images. When it comes to just freaky bizarre stuff, this movie has it by the truckload. Just dead things everywhere and disturbing practices by the villains, one which included "grandpa" sucking blood ou of the girl's finger. What was that all about? The fear in the last third rested around these guys being completely out of their minds and not knowing what they're going to do next.
The director did a fine job in building suspense because this film has a load of highly suspenseful sections that would rank it highly in the field of scares, but the characters were so unbelievable that it was hard to accept what was going on which served to ruin, at least for me, the wonderful suspense the director was setting up.
When it comes to the characters, they were mostly cardboard cutouts, none of which showing any real character beyond their purpose in the film: get killed. They performed my number one horror pet peeve: knocking senselessly on a door asking if someone is home and then just walking in when no one answers and the door is open. Seriously, who does this? This film features no less than three of these imbecils, and being Texas, they were all killed, probably for breaking and entering. I barely knew their names, much less enough about them to care that they just got hacked to death. I know it's supposed to be the human element, and I will grant the suspense in these sections was done very well, but I already booed it because they didn't belong in that house to begin with.
The final third of the film featured the heroine and only survivor screaming in a chair she was tied to at the dining room table. I know she was sitting on a corpse, but she screamed pretty randomly, so I wasn't sure if there was something going on behind her or not. Maybe she was just screaming because of the bizarre and disturbing situation.
The draw of this film for the gore hounds of the world comes down to its severely disturbing images. When it comes to just freaky bizarre stuff, this movie has it by the truckload. Just dead things everywhere and disturbing practices by the villains, one which included "grandpa" sucking blood ou of the girl's finger. What was that all about? The fear in the last third rested around these guys being completely out of their minds and not knowing what they're going to do next.
The director did a fine job in building suspense because this film has a load of highly suspenseful sections that would rank it highly in the field of scares, but the characters were so unbelievable that it was hard to accept what was going on which served to ruin, at least for me, the wonderful suspense the director was setting up.