not enough? FINE! I guess I'll have to write more! This movie is good but it's not without its flaws. For example, it has a lot in common with the shining, there are a couple plot points that go no where and are eventually dropped, some things have overly condescending explanations.
So this movie is about the Ellison Oswalt, and his immediate family. Ellison is kinda a sad sack, he wrote a best seller true crime novel roughly 10 years ago and was never able to recapture that success. He left his home and moves in to a crime scene to work on another true crime story. He doesn't tell his wife that they're living in the scene of a murder! This obviously comes up later and is not a fun conversation to have. Either way, while moving boxes around places he finds a box in his attic, this box is filled with super 8 films he watches them and they're all videos of murders, one having taken place in that particular house. These murders span the course of roughly 50 years, Ellison begins to put together a pattern for the murder and becomes more and more obsessed with the murders and starts drinking yada yada yada. It's a fairly common story. Ellison is a pretty pathetic character watching his old interviews from his hit book late at night and hoping he can accomplish that goal again.
Ok, so anyways, problems: Ellison is forgettable he's so forgettable that I actually had to look up what his name was. His wife is even more forgettable, I did look up her name and STILL can't remember it! I'm not joking, the wikipedia page is open but I'd have to go back to it and I'm just not up for that. Secondly, some of the photography stuff as well as a lot of the plot seem to be almost.....well you could've called this "The Shining Part 2: Shine Harder" I mean with the exception of the whole isolation aspect, which is the scariest part of The Shining! There's a lot of silly music queue's that are like "BE SCARED NOW!" There's also quite a bit of explaining, it's a movie here people, show don't tell. The thing that really drove me nuts is the family murdered in the house the Oswalt's are living in were hung, a tree branch was cut and the weight of the branch lifted 4 people. Forgetting that branch would have to weigh like let's say 300lbs, when the Oswalt's moved in, no one bothered to clean it up! the same damn branch is sitting there a year later! The only specific example of a plot line that was dropped was the son's night terrors but that might have been an intentional mislead so I'll let that one go. There were others and I can't remember them so they weren't that important,
Likes!: Lots of good scares lots of quality tension, has a fairly decent and unraveled plot, Ethan Hawke isn't awful, he's just kinda forgettable. The kids did a good job of actually acting so nothing wrong there. I absolutely loved some of the cinematography, there's a lot of super 8 videos in this and sometimes the film skips a little, same thing happens in a couple different scenes when you're not watching super 8 video.
From the producers of Insidious, the guy only makes 1 word titled movies with titles that mean "Bad" Stay tuned for review of "Malicious" sometime in 2013
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