Don't Believe... oh sorry, I meant Don't Breathe

Rating: 5/10 (15 November 2016)

Thrillers require a steadily escalating suspension of disbelief throughout. Once that spell is broken, all bets are off. I mean face it folks, most horror movies are essentially ludicrous. Most are chock full of convenient coincidences. Don't Breathe, however, Fede Alvarez's sophomore feature after his needless and uninspired remake of Evil Dead stands to break more than a few records in this arena, and not any to be proud of.
Look, Don't Breathe doesn't completely suck. It could have made a very cool short film. The main premise is three utterly unlikable wastes of space go for the score of a lifetime by targeting a solitary Gulf War vet in his creepy house in --- of course --- the middle of a huge apparently abandoned ghetto. The camera work is very John Carpenter, lots of nice low tracking shots that are very engrossing and fluid.
The film's main problems are the characters and the dialogue, which as in Evil Dead, borders on sub-literate. This does nothing to make us root for anyone but the "bad guy" whom the script tries to turn into an utter madman in the last third of the film with a series of ridiculous clichéd plot-twists and lifts from other psycho serial killer movies.
The scares are further sabotaged by one of the "heros" (ha ha) who seems to have more lives than Michael Myers in the entire Halloween franchise and many other yes... plot holes. There are so many plot holes in fact, that you can go to Rotten Tomatoes and find that same complaint among almost all of the negative reviews, of which there are shockingly few, although I think most of the "positive" reviews are really only so-so, as mine is. It's also a bad sign when most of the message board posts are either "WTF?" or legions of horror fanboys defending one of the few horror entries this year that doesn't outright stink.
The fact is that the general standards for horror are becoming as sloppy as many things are in our world today. You deliver one or two scares... you try for that C- and you're done, right? Sorry, it doesn't cut it for a full-length feature.