Reviews

I don't expect much from movies like this so I went into this not expecting anything aside from killing time. The movie starts out pretty typical with the loving family complete with corny cliche lines. They're in need of money and by chance the husband inherits some old family land and that's where the story begins.

As soon as they reach this abandoned land they find a house that's been abandoned for 30+ years I believe. It happens to be the old home of the husbands parents. They move into the house and surprisingly it's in pretty good shape for something abandoned in the wilds for three decades and covered in vines.

I'm not sure after this point what really is the purpose of them being in the home. It's been abandoned for decades, it's covered with mold and dust inside and the mother is just unpacking dishes like they just moved in while the father is running around the house doing I don't even know what or why.

He's climbing down an old water tank one moment, next he's in the shed playing with a generator but he has no tools to fix anything and he disappears for chunks of time. I think they forgot to add in something like showing him trying to renovate the house but they're there for about a week and they show him doing things that would only take an hour to accomplish. Meanwhile the mom is walking around the house alone most of the time discovering random things like old diaries.

The story then starts to slowly unveil as the father finds a small strange creature in his water supply tank (which they still continue to drink and use afterwards) and the mother a vet student examines it. Next the story takes on sightings of a creature and the family starting to realize that they probably shouldn't stay in a 30yo abandoned home in the middle of nowhere. I won't bother to further detail the movie.

First off this movie requires you not to take it seriously as the characters do idiotic things that make no sense just to keep the story moving forward. That is if you can allow yourself to believe in the story to begin with.

The main problem started for me with the casting btw none of these actors sell you on the script. First the mother is pretty, the father looks like the average Joe and the daughter looks like some kind of child model that came from neither of their genetics. The family casting is all the way off.

Next we have the acting. The acting is bad and cheesy and on par with the special effects that weren't that great but equal to the story.

Then we have the plot. As I said before I have no idea why this family is staying at this house for so long. It's as though they forgot to give them a purpose to stay there instead of them just viewing the property and leaving. Why would a family choose to stay in a 30yo rundown home they know nothing about including if it's even safe to even inhabit?

There's no reason to put themselves in danger. They could had easily driven up to the property, looked around and went back that very same day but instead they all decide to move in and stay for a week in a moldy dilapidated house with a drinking tank filled with dead creatures and rodents.

That's how little sense this movie makes. My favorite part was the father being a dunce for the entirely of the film. For instance he botched his bomb making plan and gets attacked by a creature and then watches his model daughter get taken.

The mother a 90lb woman comes up with a plan to rescue her child using household cleaner and dumping it into an entire pool of gallons of water like it's going to effect them. Then she somehow manages to kill two or 3 of these things and rescue her daughter.

Then she brings her entire family to safety after fighting off the last monster while saying some cheesy catch phrase and drives off. A 90lb woman does all this. Fights off these giant creatures that have chewed several people to bits. At what point did they stop trying to make their movie believable? Even as a horror movie?

That's just what you get with this film. Honestly I thought the movie had okay elements but the wrong plot. It would have been a better film if they focused on the daughter and her dog and her experiencing the strange happenings and creatures while her parents remained oblivious...and then them finding out the creatures where real for themselves after witnessing what their daughter said was true.

I've seen that child/parent/supernatural plot done in other movies and it worked better. The plot of this movie just doesn't work as well because everyone sees the creature. There's no suspense. No moment of disbelief. No buildup. They just show up and start attacking full force. It just becomes a typical made for tv monster movie.

If you're not into sci fi or horror and expect everything to be a Hollywood masterpiece with ground breaking effects,scripts and budgets you probably aren't a sci fi or horror fan.

Most of the time you over look those things to enjoy the movie for the idea of it. This movie is a solid 5/10. It has an interesting theme about love,marriage and commitment and an emotionally damaged main character.

The interesting part of the movie is an alien that becomes an obsessive stalker. Which was different.

This wasn't the greatest horror sci fi movie but it was a decent Sunday night watch for me. The pacing of the movie is a bit too slow and lacks suspense in areas to keep it interesting. So you feel like the first half of it is boring dialogue.

The second part of the film is done better where you are left guessing as to what happened to the main character only to realize she's suffering from legit trauma.

I thought that small twist was a nice touch. You didn't get a hero in this film. Just a damaged young woman that probably responded in the most realistic way of mentally shutting down to the point you didn't think she was even human.

This was a 5/10 flick. Good plot idea,so so execution. Bad pacing and a lack of suspense at times seems to drag it down a bit for me.

Somewhere along the line I'd say around 2013 or so M. Night Shyamalan because the Director to hate just because it was trendy. That was around the time people were starting to realize the "influence" of the internet and how they could use that influence to make mass groups of people think a certain way about something without any real valid reason to do so. M. Night Shyamalan was one of those victims of that. For a while it seemed no matter what movie he put out it would get bashed.

It seemed for me to start with "After Earth" that was getting bombed by people before anyone had even seen the film. The film wasn't even out yet an already people were disliking it. Then that sort of attitude carried towards pretty much anything M. Night Shyamalan directed.

Personally I have always enjoyed his movies as he seems to try approaching movies with a completely different angle and when you start breaking the story down there is quite a lesson to be found in it. I appreciate directors who are innovative vs. Someone like a Tarintino that just makes the same movie over and over again while stealing themes and ideas from old movies.

So with all that in mind I'm always interested in seeing just what his films are going to be about. One thing about his movies is that the characters always seem to have quirky dialogue, stiff almost autistic like interactions and clashing of expectations.

Old takes much of those elements and you either end up enjoying or disliking the movie based off that. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and in Old it's a mixed bag. The dialogue of the characters seems very stiff and awkward and it makes you feel like you're watching a movie rather than being captivated by a movie but the story is very interesting and that's what sells you on it.

I've read quite a few of the negative reviews and positive reviews and most of the negative reviews for this movie seem to have people complaining about things that were actually explained in the movie. A thing about M. Night Shyamalan's movies is that you might need to see it more than once or really just pay attention because there's a lot of non obvious details that you might not catch.

In Old families are being selectively targeted for vacations to a tropical resort island. Once there they find themselves in a situation they would rather not be in. The resort is not a resort but instead a pharmaceutical company that has found a naturally occurring phenomenon that causes cellular activity to expedite in living creatures. They use this phenomenon which is isolated to a beach front as a way to test drugs on people who have illness. All of the adults brought to the beach have an illness or condition but the Children do not and aren't given any medication. The medication that the adults are given seems to effect them in difference ways but mainly their bodies don't seem to age as fast while the children who aren't given anything seem to age faster. The purpose of these drug test are to find various cures and treatments for the conditions that the various adults invited to the island have. Instead of their bodies aging as rapidly their conditions they suffer from age rapidly instead but they look relatively the same as they're aging but only slower than the island would normally allow them too because the scientist need them to live long enough to study the results of the medications they're testing.

The Dog, The Old Lady, The Baby all died because the time increase affected them normally. The goal of the project was to kill off any witnesses part of the project by trapping them in the time phenomenon zone but to study the test subjects who their medications had been given to for as long as they could before they eventually died from the time increase as well.

In the time area organic materials were effected by the time phenomenon. Even decomposing bodies would be turned to dust but things like utensils, books, toys, sunglasses etc. Weren't disturbed by the time phenomenon.

There is one hint in the movie about how the group could have avoided being effected by the time...well actually there is two. There is a scene where the pregnant girl (right before we find out she is pregnant) opens a cooler filled with food that is insulated in foil. The food has not spoiled as it is basically shielded from the time effect phenomenon.

Later on the boy and his sister discover a book where someone had written in notes and theories about the island. Where one of those theories is to use metal to shield themselves from the time effect.

The boy decides that if they can find metal that they can use that as a shield but that idea never goes anywhere.

In the end of the movie the Boy and girl escape through Coral tunnel which has become a natural shield against the time effect.

These types of solutions in a M. Night Shyamalan movie are what you're supposed to be wondering about. Why did the dead coral protect them? Just like why did the water hurt the aliens in Signs and why did "grass" and "plant life" make people go crazy in that one movie of his I can't remember right now.

There's always some sort of ecological lesson in M. Knight Shayamalan's movies. I think in this one it was supposed to be that the Coral was helping to protect people from this cellar aging phenomenon and since the coral was dead it in some ways represents the current state of Coral reefs in jeopardy at a lot of these tropical resorts and places and that's supposed to be the real "make you think" shocker.

It just didn't work out that way because the movie wasn't written that well.

And that's not a good thing. A girl that has holy visions and nothing happens but her rambling and weird behavior throughout the film and then at the end something actually happens but by that time you don't care because you just want the movie to be over.

That's pretty much both the plot to Saint Maud and this movie. I hated Saint Maud with a passion because of that. I didn't hate this movie as much because it at least stayed grounded in reality where the family did think the girl was mentally ill and took her to see doctors and tried to get her help. There wasn't exactly anyone that was on board with the nonsense and they didn't annoy you for an hour and 30 minutes run time trying to make you wonder if what you were seeing was really taking place or a hallucination. The movie isn't like that and that's why this plot execution is more enjoyable than in Saint Maud.

Mostly the movie is about the toll of having to live and take care of someone that is mentally ill till the final scene where you're still left to wonder if she actually was or wasn't crazy. It's an open ender and I also hate those type of endings.

There's moments in the end where the girl seems to be the exact opposite of how she was for the entire film. Asking for an Ambulance and it appears the mother being the one to deny her aid. There's the reveal that the daughter had rigged the scale to show that she wasn't losing weight when in reality she was. So in actuality she died from self starvation and not some sort of divine rapture.

The movie ending is rather contradictory and just seems to derail the story by trying to be both grounded in reality and spiritually supernatural at the same time and the low key reveal that the mother suffered from mental illness as a child and now the daughter is basically acting out in the same way.

This reminds me also of another movie with a similar plot called "The Wonder." Where a young girl is seen as God's chosen one because she doesn't eat. Although that movie was more of a mystery movie than what this type of film was but equally as boring.

At the end of it all I can only say that this movie is great to watch if you have it on in the background. It's good enough just to pay part attention to it because not much really happens of note in the film till the end and even that is a crock of question mark nonsense.

I give this movie a 5/10 though because the acting wasn't bad and I didn't dislike the characters. It was shot nicely and the responses seemed more realistic. Although I have my own theory of this movie and that was that the mother kept the daughter at home instead of sending her off to the mental institution because she couldn't afford the care. She is having financial troubles throughout the movie after her husband passes (which is never brought up again btw) and to me that seemd most likely the reason why her crazy daughter is left to home care rather than a hospital where she could get the right treatment.

My interpretation is that the daughter had a breakdown after her father died and coped with her grief by pretending she was chosen by God and the mother eventually cracked towards the end after dealing with the stress of her daughters behavior and her financial problems. It showed where the youngest daughter was also having a personality change from the stress of dealing with her sister and her mother.

So the biggest flaw of this movie is that it has too many paths but the route is not clear as to what's really going on and those types of movies are the most annoying.

But this is truly a 1 star film.

It is extremely boring and I mean fighting to stay awake boring. It's not a horror but instead a drama about a boring middle aged woman with the personality of a boiled lobster that spends her time being a middle aged well to do Caucasian woman with a nice house by the lake in a wonderful resort town where she is about as much fun as wilted lettuce to be around. Her husband gets tired of her personality and goes on a spree cheating with groups of 20 something women who actually have personalities. Eventually he gets so tired of being with his boring wife that he'd rather kill himself than continue to be forced to be her husband and listen to her middle aged nagging.

"all the women look like me" yeah and they're all also half your age and more fun too. At first you watch this movie trying to figure out the story but then as you watch the movie you get so tired of this woman and her "I live big house by the lake and my problems are more important than yours" personality that you too feel like offing yourself to get away from her.

Although that's not what the movie is supposed to be about. The movie is really a study on age 40+ married men who seem to attract copious amounts of single 20 something attractive caucasian women with long black hair to cheat on their wives with. That to me was the most shocking part of this movie. How many attractive 20 something women with long black hair live in this rural resort town of theirs? And why are they so eager to cheat with a guy that has a boring wife? Maybe it's the dream of living by the lake? Who knows.

Well at some point in this movie the boring wife finds out her husband is not only sleeping with these 20 somethings but he's also killing them afterwards and burying them in a club house he made in the woods. You would think the movie would escalate there but after she finds the piles of bodies she goes back to her house, takes a shower and sleeps it off and then the movie basically ends.

I'm sure you thought there be more to this movie but that's pretty much the movie. I saved you all the time wasters of the boring wife stumbling around the house at night chasing noises. I saved you her boring talks with the old guy that lives? Next door? Across the lake? The next town over? It's never clear. He just appears wherever he needs to be.

There's some kind of invisible man theme going on....like that plot has ever made a good film and she has these lifetime chit chat sessions with her one blonde friend. They usually go as you'd expect a conversation between two middle aged women to go in a movie. It's like "sex in the city" without the "sex" or the "city" so it's just talking about nothing...aka "nagging".

Mostly the blonde friend tries to get the boring wife to stop prying into her dead husbands life. I honestly thought it was because she was afraid of her finding out that he was banging her too but the movie isn't that interesting. She's actually just trying to be a good friend which is also the reason why she's a boring and forgettable character.

Lets see what else happens here... she visits a book store with a snarky clerk but then runs into her husbands old bang working there and is more snarky with her than the guy at the counter. It's an awkward exchange but you don't feel bad. You just think to yourself... "I can see why he cheated on her with that girl".

The best part of this movie and where it should have ended is when the boring wife gets snarky with an annoying parent at her job. That is the golden moment of this movie and honestly the movie should have ended there and just been a short film... a very short film but it didn't it continued on into the 1 star mess that it was.

Well that's about it. Decide to watch if you want. I wish I didn't.