Reviews

.. of the other comments here. I thought that this film, albeit with fine actors all around, was just pretentious pap, especially after listening to the director, Karen Moncrieff, prattle on about how *amazing* everyone was on the commentary track, including her nanny. I love Toni Collette, I am always amazed by the performances that Brittany Murphy puts in (I rarely realize that it was her until the credits roll), but to me the sum of the parts is far less than the whole. The separate segments sparsely supported each other so while a Rashômon-, Pulp Fiction-, or even Go- style story-telling may have been what the director was shooting for, the difference between those films and this one was that those had a solid story line that held together throughout each view; you could see how the perception of reality changed with each story-teller. And, they were entertaining. In 'The Dead Girl', it was just a simple story strung chopped up into four segments, leaving the most important one for last. Good actors in a readily forgettable movie. A 4 out of 10, at best.

Imagine that your eleven-year-old just got her-or-his first My Little VideoCam and decided that she-or-he was 'going to make a movie'. This would be that movie. This is just awful - lousy acting, nonexistent script, terrible video-cam work, porn-quality 'soundtrack', all hardly warranting any inclusion into IMDb. The actors, both of them (plus 'the wife' on the phone) read their lines as if either making it up as they go or reading off a script that the director/writer had just handed them, replete with chalupa stains from the Taco Bell in the mall where he has his day job.

Remember the home-movies that M. Night Shayamalan likes to include in his movies in the bonus section? Watch those instead. This is not one of those so-bad-that-it-is-good flicks; this is just awful, not even worth a free viewing on late-night TV.

'I watched it so you wouldn't have to ...'