A thoughtful, low budget horror that's delivers more than I would have expected.
It's very script driven, and relies heavily on a natural delivery from the actors and an emotional connection with the viewer. It succeeds, too, which is impressive considering it's fairly modest budget. The script is great, and the actor's performance is excellent (all fairly unheard of people here, which adds something to the general feel (General Feel) of the movie). Not many indoor sets are used, and the exteriors are all filmed on location. The film adopts a mostly hand held-style quality, that works quite well at pushing the viewer into the room with these two sisters as they complain to one another about Buddhism, heroin, and pedestrian tunnels.
The plot isn't hugely important. Some guy dissapeared seven years ago and then it turns out that people have been vanishing in the area for all of recorded history (west coast America so... nearly one hundred years!)
Why? Well, see, a big bug, and... dark matter... because folklore, and...
Yeah, so the explanation is sort of like one of the more half-assed 'X-Files' episodes, but I wasn't really going into this expecting a thesis on parallel universes and how they influence the mechanics of dark matter in one another. The fullest explanation we get is from the freaked out younger sister (who's cool, unlike her more boring sibling - meditation? Really? Sacrifice something! BLOOD GOD NEEDS BLOOD), so it's understandable that it's pretty vague, and has mostly congealed from a collection of old newspapers and a drug influenced imagination. The creature is rarely even seen - yet another sign of a low budget - but we get the idea of it's appearance surprisingly well, and the effects are used sparingly and in dark spaces (a wise decision if they're on the 'The Mummy Returns' level of crappy - seriously Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, what were you thinking? You knew it was 2001, you knew a giant centaur-scorpion would look ridiculous. The characters in the 'Halo 2' cut scenes look more realistic. And not the anniversary, John, not the anniversary. Until then you had always been associated with such... uh... realistic.... yeah, never mind).
The scares are mostly jumpy, but they're not what makes the movie. It's a family drama, really, and unlike most family dramas it actually kept me interested and sort of rooting for them (as far as I'm concerned dramas are alright, so long as you're not soaping it up too heavily, but when the hated "F" word gets involved - not "fuck" - I start throwing things at the screen in my haste to turn it off. I think Keith Richards was just trying to turn off a family drama at the Andaz West Hollywood).
A neat little movie overall. A good one to watch if you want horror and are not a moron, but it's not really worth your precious time watching it alone unless you're really into the genre already.
Adsentia: 46.9