Tag: The Devil Inside

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Leena Klammer is a 31 year old woman with a rare disorder that causes her to look like a child. She uses this to worm her way into a family by pretending to be their lost daughter Esther.

When you go to see a film you usually have questions you want answered: How will John Wick surpass the previous films? Who’s that mysterious person in the trailer? Is this where we begin to see that the MCU actually does have a plan? With this, the question was more “so it’s a prequel to a film that came out 13 years ago? How’s that going to work? And we already know the twist, she’s not a child, she’s an adult killer, so again; how is this going to work?”

As a general rule, prequels are terrible. They have zero tension because the film tries to put have life or death situations with characters we know to survive. As good as they were, NOBODY watches X-Men First Class and thinks “oh no, I don’t know whether Magneto or Charles Xavier are going to survive”. There’s also sequel escalation to deal with: because it comes after, the natural choice is to have bigger stakes, but it’s a prequel so it just feels weird. The “prequels are terrible” rule is ESPECIALLY true in horror movies; they have a habit of exploring characters who we don’t want to see explored, they ruin the mystery of the villains and make them seem weaker, ruining the whole franchise.

All of that, combined with the fact that I didn’t see any trailers at the cinema for this lead me to go in with low expectations. On the bright side, it’s just over 90 minutes so at least it will be over soon, plus I’m getting free nachos so that’s something.

I was surprised. I genuinely loved this movie. There’s a reveal in this where your experience as a viewer changes. It’s SUCH a good reveal too. The kind that makes you want to watch the film again to see if you can catch it before it happens. It also doesn’t impact the other film in the franchise. This does tie into the previous film, there are a few allusions to it here and there, and the ending directly leads into it. But it is a stand-alone film. It explains the character well enough that if you hadn’t seen the original, you won’t be lost. THAT’S how a film like this should be, it should reward viewers of the original, but it shouldn’t appeal ONLY to them. This is probably my favourite prequel I’ve seen.

Now onto the stand-alone analysis. There seems to be more of a focus on bright colours in this one, which provides a kind of nice motif throughout the whole thing. It’s not exactly unique, but it does make it stand out among the dark greys and browns of a lot of horror films. Directed by William Brent Bell, I’ve seen two of his films before (The Devil Inside, Brahms The Boy 2) and I fucking hated them, but his style works for this. There are some great uses of blank spaces to highlight how small Esther is compared to her surroundings.

Onto Esther, she’s played by Isabelle Fuhrman again, the last time she played her she was 12, she’s now 25. To reiterate: she’s 25, playing a 31-year-old who looks like a 9-year-old. It’s so weird but she pulls it off. This performance puts the character of Esther on another level, and makes you think that they must be really regretting killing her off at the end of the first one, and making the ending of this one tie so heavily into the start of the original. This character deserves to feature in more films, and I’m not sure how they’re going to do that now (although they are planning it). Her story is locked in, we’ve essentially seen the beginning and the end, with no room for a middle. The other members of the cast are okay, most of them are serviceable. Julia Stiles is a revelation though, I’ve seen her in a lot of stuff before, but this is her at her best. It felt like the first time she was a character and not just Julia Stiles. Rossif Sutherland is okay, I guess, but he’s stuck between two superb performances, and just doesn’t match it.

In summary I’d say definitely watched this. It’s a different film to the first one, but one I enjoyed a lot more.

Truth Or Dare (2018)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

The ending to this film is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, and I once witnessed a guy fall over trying to kick a pigeon.

The ending to this film is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, and I once witnessed a guy try to start a fight with a bus. Not the people on the bus, the bus itself.

The ending to this film is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen myself run this joke into the ground long after it stopped being funny

So yeah, I was not a fan of the ending. That’s the thing with horror, as a genre you really need to nail the ending otherwise it clouds the entire experience of the film. A lot of my hatred for both The Gallows and Unfriended is based around how poorly they executed the ending, both of them had great potential endings, but they then kept going. It’s hard to close a horror movie though, you need people to leave being scared, but you have to balance that with providing narrative closure, and usually, it’s the closure that suffers through the use of last-second jump scares and “the killer is still alive”, and if the ending doesn’t provide a satisfactory closure then it can feel like the entire film was a massive waste of time, like the entire thing was a prequel to a film that might not even happen. Side note: if you’re a fan of terrible movie endings, check out The Devil Inside, bad endings are one thing, but that film doesn’t even have an ending, it just stops and tells you to check out the website. So as you can tell, I’ve seen a lot of bad endings in films, especially horror, but rarely have I seen a film fuck up the closing stretch so badly. Part of me wants to spoil it so I can talk about it more, but part of me also thinks you need to see it so you can realise how badly they messed it up. The characters were mostly unlikeable to begin with, and the end of the film is basically them potentially causing the death of every single person on the planet, and it’s played off like this was the right and moral thing to do.

I mean, it wasn’t exactly the greatest film before that. As I said before, the characters were almost completely detestable and annoying, and because of the 15 rating their deaths aren’t even as satisfying as they could be. They’re not inventive enough either, the Final Destination series was great at the “seemingly co-incidental deaths” set pieces, that kind of approach would be great here as a way to kill people (people die if they refuse to do the dare, or if they lie). The first time we see this is pretty unique, a guy pulls out of his dare, and slips on a pool ball, breaking his neck. But even this shows a few problems which plague the rest of the film. For one thing, the person affected has a weird smile which I think is supposed to be creepy, but just looks like a weird snapchat filter. This makes it obvious they are not in control of their actions, which make it not as fun, it would be a lot more fun if they died as themselves due to the universe being set up that way just in case they failed, as it is it just means they get possessed and commit suicide, and nobody notices the physically impossible smile on their face and weird tone in their voice.

It’s not all bad though, it does have some neat ideas, albeit they don’t really do anything with those ideas. It occasionally seems like a satire about the notion of internet fame/infamy and the fine line between the two, but it’s so underdeveloped I’m not entirely sure it’s deliberate. One of the subplots about a homosexual character being scared to come out to his strict father also shows promise, but is never really realised. Imagine if when his truth was “come out to your father”, that even with the threat of death he still couldn’t do it? And then the father found out why he died and is forever haunted by his behaviour towards his son in the past. That would make it a lot more powerful, haunting and depressing.

One last thing, the performances. Oh my science, the performances. Horror has a (deserved) reputation for occasionally having (how can I put this diplomatically?), let’s say, less than stellar performances from actors, all really obvious fake screams and performances which somehow are a mix of overacting and underacting. And this film? The performances in this………are really fucking good. Hayden Szeto (from the incredibly underknown Edge Of Seventeen) is all kinds of great in this, giving his character the emotional depth and nuance that the script doesn’t. Lucy Hale plays her character like a slightly broken bird, and it works. Landon Liboiron deserves to be the smug asshole villain in a spy movie. There’s not really a weak link in the performances here, a magnificent ensemble cast who are giving it there all, it’s just a shame the script didn’t.