Complete Fail...

Rating: 2/10 (12 September 2010)

This movie fails in basically every basic feature... Where should I start? The plot: is as shallow as a baby pool and does not have any original feature. It's a exorcism (evil spirits, etc) meets the ring (pass the curse to the next one and survive) which exploits to exhaustion all the clichés of these movies. The director seemed (?) to be interested in having some comedy moments, but I guess that most of them were totally unintentional, since in the theater where I went ppl were laughing in the scenes that were supposed to scare...
Originality: no. you'll be able to see doors and windows closing mysteriously, the usual progression of this type of strange stuff until the very intense ending when the devil is confronted by the hero (and two additinonal predictable twists. The only new feature could be the sort of moral story that I think the director was trying to embedd in all this mess: the girl is not so decent, since she can do whatever to succeed, has a very rude behavior with the old woman (including in the parking lot: "I got you bitch!"), kills a sweet animal and disrespects a dead body", which may cause the audience to have mixed feelings about whether she deserves or not what's happening. However, this really does not work, for various reasons... In the bank, there is a guy who is even worse than her, which kind of gives the impression to the audience that she had just a bad moment but in general is a nice person. And the other moments where the director tries to convey the message are so cheesy that the result is a massive laugh of the audience (was this planned in the car fighting scene? In the theater I went everyone was laughing their .... out of it! quite a bad start, isn't it?). I could tell much more: for example, why the introduction, if this medium-woman ends up not having any decisive role in fighting against the demon? So much weight was put on this personal revenge of the woman, and then she gets totally owned by the "bad guy"... With whom should we have a connection in the movie, if the girl is killing a cat and doing other nasty stuff along the movie? With the medium-guy that shows up some the times? With the boyfriend that is totally clueless and useless in the crucial scenes? Characters: ridiculous. All of them, expect for the medium-guy and the manager of the bank. The rest o them were just clichés without any character development at all: the sceptical boyfriend, the unfair work colleague, the spiritual Spanish medium-woman, the angry gypsy woman... The main character has some more work in it, but in my opinion the director is not able to pull together the moral dilemmas that she should be feeling. She decides very easily to kill the cat, and the scene has no intensity at all; for example, it seemed she was worried in refusing to extend the credit to the old woman than to kill her innocent pet! The actors seem a little lost in this movie, in particular the main character, who sometimes seems undecided on whether to show tension or coolness, since the story swings unpredictably from horror to comedy.
Music: I could sense that something wrong was happening since the initial credits... The music would work for a superheros movie, but not for the so of movie I was going to watch! And this happened many, many times throughout the movie... The music was completely out placed, and was used too much, and when used was too much present for a horror movie.
Special effects: very intense and bad use of them. The director should try to watch Martys, a horror film that I liked very much. In this movie, the is almost no CGI and the evil characters are all human. There are no ghosts, no speaking goats, no flying handkerchief and other stuff that just makes you disconnect from the movie.