Polaroid (2017)

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, TEEN
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PRESS SCREENING)

NOTE - Dimension invited me to see this movie back in 2017, when it was still scheduled for release that December. I assume their troubles have kept them from bothering to tinker with it, so now that it's finally here - dumped onto VOD - I am finally publishing the review I wrote then and can presumably stand by it.

I'm gonna be up front with you guys: I am currently 37 years old, which is about twenty years over the range of Polaroid's target audience. While some PG-13 films aren't necessarily aimed at younger audiences (What Lies Beneath being one of the best examples, in that only a middle aged adult could possibly find that movie entertaining), this one focuses on high school students and their various teenager issues (i.e. Will the popular guy at school notice our introverted teenager? And will her single mother stop working double shifts long enough to stay home and have dinner with her?), and even more notably has a plot that hinges on taking a picture at a "the parents are out of town" house party. It's the sort of movie that will be frequently rented for sleepovers and might even be the gateway for a few kids who weren't allowed to see It or Annabelle - but that doesn't mean it's a waste of time for adults, either.

Indeed, among these Ring-type horror movies (where a device of some sort turns out to be haunted) it's actually one of the better ones, thanks to a few smart choices, a likable group of protagonists, and (thankfully) a minimum of fake scares like overly loud doorbells or whatever. As you might expect from the title, the haunted object this time around is a Polaroid camera, which our photographer and antique-loving heroine Bird (Kathryn Prescott) is gifted from her coworker who found it at a yard sale ("It even has a few rolls of film," he tells us, so that we don't have to wonder how someone can find old-school Polaroid film in their small town in the year 2017). Thanks to an otherwise unnecessary prologue we already know the camera is haunted, so we're able to move right along - she uses it to take a picture of the coworker in order to test it out, and then she goes to a party and takes a picture of her friends, plus another solo shot of the mean girl who is hosting the party. The coworker and the mean girl are offed that night, and Bird quickly realizes that everyone who gets their picture taken with it will die.

Yes, this is a goofy plot, but then again so is watching a VHS tape and dying a week later, so we can't really complain. In fact, part of what makes the movie work is that the script doesn't act embarrassed about its own plot by having everyone keep saying "You're crazy!" or whatever. After the two acquaintances are killed, she tells her other friends (the ones in the group photo) what seems to be going on, and instantly one of them tries to burn the picture - which causes his girlfriend's arm to catch on fire, and no one can extinguish it until Bird stomps out the fire on the photo. The photo then magically reforms itself right in front of them, so they all have seen its supernatural powers with their own eyes, rather than the usual "doubt until it's too late" approach that so many others opt to try. By skipping past the naysaying, we are able to introduce new wrinkles and avoid deja vu - hell the backstory doesn't even require finding a body entombed in a wall or whatever and in need of a proper burial!

The backstory is actually fairly disturbing, almost to the point of making me wonder why they were so teen-centric with the rest of the movie as it deals with some rather upsetting material that parents might not be down with their kids hearing about at this juncture. Also, the casting of a key role in the mystery (which doesn't really kick in until the third act, once we've gotten the cast whittled down a bit) is a bit on the nose, as the actor/actress is most famous for playing a very similar role (hint: they reprised it this year) and I honestly can't tell if it's genius or an inadvertent spoiler. Speaking of the cast, I trust you'll all be as happy as I was to see Mitch Pileggi show up as the town's sheriff and pretty much the only skeptic in the film, as he doesn't witness the haunted camera as the other characters do. Not only is it always fun to see him on screen, it's particularly amusing to see Horace "Shocker" Pinker scoff at the idea that a dead killer might be using an electronic device to rack up more victims from beyond the grave.

That's another thing I enjoyed about the movie: the makers seem to have an affinity for the genre, but don't stoop to rubbing our noses in it. There are no overt references to other films - I just got the sense that they had seen the same ones and were trying to avoid copying them too much, while still hitting all the beats that the target audience would need for the film to hold their interest. It's not exactly deconstructing anything, but like, when she tries to take a picture of her dog and he runs away before she can, I couldn't help but think "OK, they've seen Wish Upon too and don't want to repeat their mistake of killing the damn dog off to show us how it works" (I know that this film was shot before Wish Upon's release and therefore that can't be the exact case - it's just the example that came to mind, so just go with the general idea). Likewise, when the popular boy she likes starts talking to her, you worry it's because he's an asshole and there's some prank coming (i.e. a character to hate whose death we can enjoy), but he's a genuinely good dude who goes above and beyond to help her solve the mystery. In fact, as I mentioned all the kids are pretty likable; one gets heated when he realizes they're all targeted and kind of blames Bird for their predicament, but he makes up for it after a bit (and she holds no grudge against him, either) so it comes off as believable panic and frustration as opposed to another modern horror flick where everyone seems to hate their friends.

As for the PG-13 rating, it's not too much of a crutch. Again, the backstory is pretty dark, and one character is split in half (albeit with nary a drop of bloodspray), so it at least pushes the limits of the restriction. I don't think it was cut down to be softer (this IS a Dimension film after all, so the possibility is always there), though there were a few scenes where it seemed like conversations were trimmed in order to move things along. I'm sure it was all just needless exposition or insignificant character backstory kind of stuff, i.e. nothing that would be missed; it's only noticeable because a character will say like "OK, great!" or something along those lines when the other person wasn't really saying anything that would produce that kind of a response. But anything seems Oscar-worthy after the abominations of Rings and Wish Upon, the latter of which didn't even seem like they actually finished it yet, so I probably shouldn't even note it.

Long story short, this is the sort of movie that could have very easily annoyed the shit out of me and had me saying things like "teens deserve better". But it's made with some basic intelligence and a refreshing lack of aiming for the lowest common denominator. It's not particularly great or anything, but as I've said in the past, if I can moderately enjoy a film when I'm technically old enough to be a parent to its target audience, then I think they've done their job well, and that's fine by me. The snowy climate was also a plus (I'm never going to get over the loss of the snowbound Friday the 13th movie) and they kept the CGI villain to a minimum (and he didn't really look all that bad - plus the "melting film" effect we'd see when he was moving or being injured was kind of cool), so overall it's a "more right than wrong" kinda deal. "The year's best teen horror!" might be dim praise, but it's better than sucking outright, no?

What say you?

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Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019)

AUGUST 9, 2019

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I suppose I should note that my experience with Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark consists of reading at least one, I think two of the volumes in 3rd or 4th grade courtesy of my school library. I'm sure I had my favorites, ones I'd re-read before returning the book(s), and probably talked about them with a friend or two, but that's about it. That was damn near 30 years ago; my memories have faded to the point of being completely useless - I might as well just say that I am aware that the books exist and that they had some creepy-ass art. Last month at trivia there was a round on the original stories and we got a zero, and it wasn't a case of "Oh man, I'd know it if I heard it!" kind of answers - the questions might as well have been in another language.

Luckily, this means I won't be sad that my favorite story or stories weren't represented in the feature film version, or that they changed something about them, or any of the other complaints people tend to make whenever a childhood fave is adapted for the screen. That said, I do know for certain that the context is changed, because instead of making a traditional anthology film that you'd expect given the source material of unrelated short stories, director André Øvredal and his writers (which include producer Guillermo del Toro) weaved a few of them into a larger narrative, not unlike the Goosebumps movie. To me, this was the right call - if they just picked 3-5 of the stories and did straight adaptations, it'd probably be a bit of a bore, not to mention an instant turn-off for fans who may have had a different wishlist of what stories should be done.

Instead, we get a pretty traditional narrative about a group of friends accidentally unleashing evil and trying to figure out how to stop it, allowing a few of the books' iconic monsters to show up in a single story. This means we get invested in the heroes and that the film has a driving force from start to finish, as opposed to the stop/go/stop again that can plague an anthology film's overall strength. Take Creepshow or its first sequel for example - if you don't like a particular story (in my case, I have next to no love for Something To Tide You Over in the original and Chief Woodenhead in Creepshow 2), that's a section of the film that you don't like, and probably want to skip over on Blu-ray. You can't really do that here; even if you don't care for, say, "Big Toe", if you skip over that chunk of the movie, you won't know what happens to one of its primary characters.

And yes, things do happen to our group of heroes - this may be aimed at the younger horror crowd, but that doesn't mean it's been sanitized of any real danger. It's almost structured like a Final Destination movie, in fact - our main character, Stella, is the one who first opened/read the book and keeps it with her at all times, and when she notices a new story being written right before her eyes (in blood), she will race to that person's aid and try to warn them of the danger that they're in. Unfortunately she's usually too late or they simply don't listen to her, and then after some "we have to figure out how to stop it!" kind of stuff the process will begin again, as a new story appears and she once again runs off to try to stop it - same as any FD movie functions once the one who had the vision realizes what's going on and arrives at the person's house (or office, or gym, or whatever) just in time to watch one of the classic Rube Goldbergian setpieces unfold.

The deaths here aren't that elaborate though; if anything Øvredal minimizes the actual violence in favor of the buildup, which worked pretty well for this non-reader as I didn't know what form the evil was about to take. For example at one point a character notices that the next story (at that point, the title is all that appears) is "Me-Tie-Dough-Ty-Walker", so if you read the story you'd know what was coming, more or less. I didn't have a clue, so I got to be just as surprised as the character (Gil Bellows, in this case) when a head came rolling out of a chimney and started talking. I didn't personally find the movie all that scary, but the genuine stakes and continued surprises (read: new monsters who were taking their turn as the focus for a few minutes) kept it more or less engaging anyway.

I say more or less because despite this correct approach, it still kinda ran out of steam for me around the halfway point, when a character makes a rather silly decision for seemingly no other reason than to give the filmmakers the opportunity to add another monster to the mix. Stopping the evil isn't a time-consuming process, and Stella seems smart enough to figure out what she has to do (or at least, where to go), so the movie could have been over quicker if she just went and did that instead of choosing to stay in a holding cell with her friend Ramón, who is suspected of wrongdoing by Bellows' sheriff character. They also don't spend a lot of time on Sarah, the ghostly girl who is seemingly behind all of the terror, making her a rather unexciting archvillain - more of her and her story could have helped the climax feel like a real showstopper, but instead it just feels like another obstacle.

Another odd thing about the movie is that there's more interesting things going on in the margins than in the actual narrative. For starters, it's set just before the 1968 election, and since I've recently learned that people don't bother to know their history when sitting down to watch a period piece, this means that young folks are going off to fight in the Vietnam War, and the US populace was about to vote for the man who'd become the 2nd shadiest President of all time. In other words: bummer times, and our characters are living through their last carefree years before they're old enough to be drafted (in fact one of them already IS old enough, as we learn later). The film opens on Halloween, and the kids are dressing up to go out, despite knowing they're getting too old to be putting on costumes - it's in service of a revenge prank on the local asshole, but I still got the impression they were trying to hold on to the youth the country seemed determine to end for them by shipping them off to war the second they were eligible.

Also, Ramón is the victim of racism, both at the hands of the aforementioned asshole (who calls him a wetback) as well as a comparatively subtle form from the sheriff, who immediately zeroes in on him as an "outsider" of sorts and laughs when his car is destroyed (for an extra bit of evidence that the sheriff's an asshole, we later learn he's also a Nixon voter!). Normally when we're talking about racially charged elements of the 1960s, it's specifically black characters being targeted, so it's interesting to see it from a Latino's perspective for a change, and used just enough for it to be notable without being distracting. Also "for a change", Night of the Living Dead shows up courtesy of a drive-in double feature (with fellow public domain staple The Terror, though we never see any of that one), but it's not just because it's free for the filmmakers to use - it takes place a few weeks after the movie originally came out! It's the exact right movie to use, for possibly the first time ever.

Ultimately, it's a pretty good movie that comes almost frustratingly close to being just straight up good. They had all of the right pieces in play, but there would always be one "off" decision keeping a setpiece from being as exciting/scary as it should have been (for example, the spiders that come out of the girl's cheek should have had me squirming, but alas the digital bugs are by far the worst CGI in the film), and if you ask me its first half wasn't as strong as its second, which added to my somewhat muted overall impression. One of Stella's friends is also kind of a lousy actor (or at least, giving a lousy performance), which also diminished some of its strength, since it's right around where he makes his exit that the film also starts to lose steam narratively. But on the other hand, the Halloween atmosphere (at least in the first 20 minutes) and small town setting (Pennsylvania to be specific, though naturally it was shot in Canada) make it a fine way to start prepping for the upcoming season, and it'll be a great midway film for nine or ten year olds who have gotten too old for House With A Clock In Its Walls but aren't ready for Freddy or Jason just yet.

What say you?

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Slender Man (2018)

AUGUST 10, 2018

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I pay zero attention to "Creepypasta" type nonsense, so I never heard of the Slender Man story until I saw a news story about a pair of dumbass 12 year old girls who stabbed their friend in an attempt to appease this made-up boogeyman and "live with him in his mansion" (the girl they stabbed survived and recovered, thankfully). Since then there have been other, less severe incidents stemming from people thinking this guy is a real thing, but since they're all in jail or institutionalized Sony will have trouble reaching their target audience for their film about it, i.e. idiots that buy into the idea that he's real, which is the only way I can see anyone being scared by his presence in this woefully undercooked flick.

The main problem with the film is that it seems to assume we all know the story well, or, at least, that it's as universally known an urban legend as the man with the hook or the "calls are coming from inside the house!" kind of scenarios. But, you know, it's not - it's an internet thing with origins only dating back less than a decade ago; even "Leroy Jenkins" has a more storied pedigree. The movie gives a bit of context early on, when our group of four teenaged girls amuse themselves during a sleepover by going online and trying to summon him (prompting the usual "What's (this thing that the others know about)"/90 seconds of exposition conversation that peppers just about every supernaturally driven horror movie post-The Ring), but after that he just shows up for jump scares. Imagine if Candyman never gave Tony Todd anything to do beyond show up in underlit backgrounds, with no backstory or connection to the protagonist, and... well, you'd probably still have a better movie than this.

In fact I got the sneaking suspicion that at some point in development, the writer planned to do a fictionalized version of the real-life stabbing tragedy, but either got cold feet or was forced to change it by the powers that be (possibly even after shooting, since the trailer shows two major sequences that are not in the film). The plot really kicks off when one of the four, Katie (Annalise Basso from Oculus), disappears during a field trip to a cemetery - but the scene actually showing that (kidnapping? murder?) is jarringly absent from the film, cutting from the girl just looking at one of the tombstones to a few hours later, when everyone is wondering where she is. Given that it's only about 20 minutes into the movie - i.e. time for a traditional scare scene - its absence is very awkward, but would be necessary in the long run if one or more of the other girls had something to do with her disappearance. Plus, throughout the movie main girl Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles) seems to be dodging direct questions about the disappearance, as if she knew more than she was letting on, and apart from nightmares is conspicuously left alone by Slender Man who keeps appearing to the two remaining girls.

(SPOILERS AHEAD!)

So it all seems to be heading toward some sort of half-assed High Tension thing (most tellingly in a scene where she tries messaging the same mysterious Slender Man website contact who has been talking to the others, only to get no reply. HMMMMM...), but then it gets dropped in a rushed, incredibly anticlimactic sequence where her sister goes into a coma for some reason and she goes off to confront Slender Man, who... sucks her into a tree, I guess? Then there's an epilogue about how he spreads like a virus, and the film ends. So did Katie get sucked into a tree too? Why did their other friend Chloe just turn into a zombie of some sort? Why was Hallie acting so suspicious every time someone asked about Katie's whereabouts? It's clunky AF, and joins the film's already overstocked collection of problems.

Such as the fact that it's not even remotely scary. And no, I'm not talking about me simply not being scared - the theater had a good sized crowd for a weekday matinee (half full-ish) with plenty of the target teens among them, and I didn't hear a single gasp/scream during the entire film (the D- Cinemascore suggests this was not an anomaly). Almost all of the scare scenes play out identically: someone hears a creaking/stick breaking kind of sound, the image gets a bit warbly thanks to a bunch of After Effects filters, and then they see Slender Man (Javier Botet, of course) standing in a corner or something before he starts to move toward them, often accompanied by CGI tentacles and/or spider-legs. Then they either wake up because it was a dream or they disappear from the narrative and our heroine seemingly doesn't care much. The only effective moment in the entire movie comes about an hour in, when Hallie starts making out with her Miles Teller-y boyfriend and starts hallucinating him making all these weird faces, which made me laugh because if they kept going and had sex, he'd just be making *other* weird faces.

Another insurmountable issue is that our characters are the least interesting batch of horror teens in ages; you'd have to go back to C-listers from the early '80s slasher heyday to find a group this less distinguished. The only girl who seems interesting is the one that disappears first, leaving us with three that might as well be interchanged from scene to scene. There's some early attempts at what you'd think would be foreshadowing, such as Hallie's running prowess and her little sister's desire to be a part of their group, but neither element is mentioned again, and I honestly know less about Hallie's other two friends (one of whom is played by Joey King, who is 0-2 lately between this and Wish Upon) after spending 90 minutes with them. And pretty much *only* them, as the male characters and parents become literal background extras as the film goes on, to the point where I wasn't sure if Hallie's mother was in the hospital or if it was just a nurse since they didn't bother to give a closeup of the woman (or names to either parent; even though Michael Reilly Burke is a familiar enough character actor he's just "Hallie's Dad" in the credits). Not that calling him "Bill" would solve the movie's problems, but if you're going to minimize every other character to this degree, why can't the ones that are in focus be more developed?

It's possible that they DID have all of that characterization and I simply couldn't see it, however. Since Peter Hyams is in director's jail I would have to go back to AVP: Requiem to find a major release film this murky and underlit, with two would-be standout sequences being so dark I literally had trouble telling what was happening. I even wondered if something was amiss with the transfer itself, but every now and then we were treated to a nice establishing shot of the northern Massachusetts locale, so I know they could photograph things properly and that it wasn't the theater projecting it wrong. And I often wondered why they even cast Botet at all since his interactions with cast members were so brief and often overshadowed by his CGI appendages, making it a pointless decision to use a real actor at all when you consider how many of his appearances are in blurry backgrounds that could have been achieved just as easily with visual FX.

You see how bad this movie is? It has me saying "CGI would be better". Ugh. The theaters in the Milwaukee area where the stabbing occurred have declined to show the film out of respect for the residents who were affected by it; it would be a good thing if every other town joined them in solidarity. So you're safe, Winchester, for this is right now the frontrunner for worst major release horror movie of the year. And don't see that as a sort of "challenge"; I assure you this is not the "fun" kind of bad like Gotti or whatever - it's just a slog. Just watch the documentary, which is what I wish I had done instead.

What say you?

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Wish Upon (2017)

JULY 14, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, TEEN
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I know I'm not the target audience for teen horror movies, so all I really ask of them is that they're OK enough timekillers and something I can watch with my son in a few years when I deem him old enough for PG/PG-13 fare. But I'd rather he went out and got laid than stayed home wasting his time and insulting his intelligence with Wish Upon, a hopelessly sloppy "Monkey's Paw" variant that can barely get the basics right, let alone what little it adds to the table - I'd wait until he was old enough to get drunk with me and "appreciate" nonsense like this. And by that I mean also laugh at (not "with") all of its clunky writing, at times abysmal direction, and shockingly horror-lite approach to this sort of thing.

In fact, one of the two nice things I can say about the movie is that it doesn't have any fake scares or even that many BOO! moments at all - everything just kind of happens with a shrug, usually telegraphed (poorly) long before it actually occurs. At times, director John Leonetti (Annabelle) and screenwriter Barbara Marshall (co-writer of the pretty good Blumhouse "Tilt" release Viral) throw in some mild Final Destination-y suspense to the proceedings, but otherwise it's only a horror movie in the technical sense - there is only one or two moments in the movie that might make even the least discerning teenage audience shriek, but even they might just laugh at it instead (like I did, sober and by myself at a 10:30 am screening). I give them credit for not falling prey to the "We need to get them jumping every five minutes!" mentality that has sullied any number of horror films aimed at the younger set, but they went too far in the opposite direction.

And that would be fine if the story and characters were involving enough to not even notice, but the script (or, at least, this representation of it - more on that soon) never gives its solid cast anything to work with, and everyone is a stereotype. Our heroine (Joey King) is a high school outcast with two friends of similar social standing, and since she's brunette her class nemesis is a blonde girl of no other distinction, and pretty much everyone else exists only to serve as a victim to the wish box's hazily explained rules. See, this isn't the usual "Monkey's Paw" kind of thing where the wish comes back ironically (like, you wish for someone to be alive and they come back as a zombie) - she gets her wishes and they work as intended, but later on (there's no rhyme or reason to when) the box will open and play some music, at which time it kills someone who had nothing to do with her wish, and in some cases is so unnecessary to the narrative that no one notices they're dead for a few days. There's no real reason for this other than to ensure it takes her most of the movie to figure out the connection between her wishes and people in her life dying, and Marshall botches what I guess was an inadvertent cause and effect scenario: her wish for a crush's returned affections leads to her uncle being killed, and then she wishes to get everything from his will. It'd be ludicrous, but at least kind of cool, to have the box - an old hand at this by now - continue this sort of chain, so that each death inadvertently inspires the next wish in order to keep things moving along, but that's the only time there's any sort of relation (and again, it's not acknowledged anyway).

The other nice thing I can say is that her wishes are typical teenager nonsense: she wishes to be popular, she wishes her dad (Ryan Philippe!) wasn't such an embarrassment (he's a dumpster diver, even though they own a big house), she wishes her bully would "just rot" (not "die", notice). She doesn't go big (a friend admonishes her for not curing cancer) or even particularly "bad" - she just asks for stuff any selfish 16 year old girl might wish for. Since the deaths have no relation and she doesn't even notice most (even her uncle's barely registers much of a reaction) you could remove them from the first hour of the movie and it wouldn't even really change anything; it'd just be a movie about a girl making her life better thanks to some Chinese box her dad found in a dumpster one day. By the time she actually notices (actually, she doesn't - her would-be boyfriend does the legwork and flat out tells her) that her wishes have deadly consequences, the movie is far past the point of being saved, with only the idiotic death scenes to occasionally give it some unintentionally hilarious life.

Now, we all know that horror movie characters have to occasionally act stupid for the plot to work. It's just how it is, and it's something we just accept, like sound in space or everyone in a musical knowing the words to a seemingly spontaneous song. But the Wish Upon creative team forces its actors to at times even unnaturally contort their bodies to make their not-great (and not even original) death scenes work, in particular Sherilyn Fenn's garbage disposal one. Like all disposal scenes in horror movies, something goes down the drain and we get a bunch of shots of their hand reaching around in the drain cut with shots of the switch that will turn it on - except this switch isn't on the wall like a normal one - it's BY HER WAIST BELOW THE COUNTER! I can't imagine anything more idiotic, or at least I thought I couldn't - because 30 seconds later she goes for a closer look at the drain and starts awkwardly shaking her head around just to get her long hair in there, and then awkwardly moving again in order to bump the switch and send her to her doom. There's also a bit where Philippe is changing his tire and one of the lug-nuts goes under his car - does he use the tire iron to pull it back? Of course not, he climbs completely under his car (it never occurs to him to just go to the other side of the car to get it, since it's clearly closer to it) so that we can get some half-assed suspense about whether or not the car will fall on him. Another character is also encouraged to awkwardly lean far from his ladder while cutting a tree branch, to the extent where I began wondering if these characters were all suicidal.

Speaking of suicide (my transitions are on fucking POINT), the film begins with a woman hanging herself after throwing away something wrapped up so that we can't see it, but the dog is afraid of it and she gives about forty seven worried glances at the trashcan before going inside to start noosin'. If you've never seen a movie (hell, if you're not even sure what a movie IS) you can still know instantly that the thing is the wish box that will soon wreak havoc on our heroine's life (said woman is her mom, by the way), and yet the movie treats this as a big reveal for some reason, and it's never clear what exactly mom wished for. We can assume it has something to do with the aforementioned uncle character, who Philippe doesn't like much and even tells his daughter not to talk to him, but the reason for his excommunication is never explained. The box also gets one tragic backstory too many, as we learn about its origins from a Chinese woman during the bubonic plague in the 14th century, but then our exposition dumper throws in a few seconds' worth of what I'm betting was originally a full prologue scene starring Jerry O'Connell (think Drew Barrymore or, more recently, Billy Burke in Lights Out), a man who used the box to get a car dealership or something but then his life was torn asunder - it was hard to get the details because I was too distracted by Jerry O'Connell (and Rebecca Romijn!) suddenly appearing in a flurry of random wordless shots, 75 minutes into a movie that had already burned through two other "Older star cashing a paycheck" performances (Fenn and Elizabeth Rohm being the others).

There are other sloppy bits as well; there's an establishing shot that looks like they grabbed it off a VHS tape, and for some reason the main house King and Philippe live in changes each time we see it - when they first move in and throughout the film we can see it's a two or three story white mansion, but then at other times the house is established as a single floor extended ranch kind of deal. King freaks out over her friend (Barb from Stranger Things, basically playing Barb here as well) taking the box from her, but it's not until about 30 seconds after her reaction and subsequent tirade that we even see the box to know what she's talking about, because Leonetti didn't bother to include a cutaway to the damn thing. I know the film had its death scenes trimmed for a PG-13 rating (why they'd shoot R rated deaths for a teenager's wish-fulfillment thriller is beyond me), but there is plenty of evidence to suggest they cut more than the gory bits, and I'm curious if the promised extended Blu-ray will make more sense out of some of its subplots.

Long story short, it's another one to add to the pile of this year's "Not even as good as the "eh" I was expecting" efforts like Rings and The Bye Bye Man, though this at least has a slight edge over those thanks to its unintentional hilarity (there's a bit involving someone getting hit by a car that rivals Meet Joe Black for its misguided excess), and again, I appreciated that they weren't trying to make me jump out of my seat at doorbells and dogs barking and things like that. The idea of getting your actual wishes but making something else awful happen is intriguing (it's not dissimilar from The Box in that regard, sans all the alien shit Richard Kelly added to the scenario), but the aforementioned sloppiness and bad-even-by-teen-horror-standards characterization make it impossible to care about anything that's happening any more than King's character does.

What say you?

P.S. Stay for halfway through the credits for the most obvious and eye-rolling sequel setup ever! Or don't bother since you'll know exactly what it is once the movie has its first ending anyway!

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