The goat and the machete

Rating: 7/10 (3 June 2009)

I won't pretend to score critical points by suggesting this is pretty silly material. But is it scary? I'll sleep well tonight.
It does have style. Taking some of the elements (stylistically and thematically) from Brian De Palma's "Carrie" (that's a compliment), we're amused to see an ugly duckling already transforming into a swan. It's more amusing still that she's a loan officer and is faced with a dilemma: Should she deny an extension on a mortgage payment and earn points with her boss or should she give in and extend it to basically do the right thing?
She makes the wrong choice and really pays for it. Alison Lohman serves the material well because she's someone we see as both vulnerable and growing into her own.
The honey-colored cinematography, the almost camp skewering of quite a few California "types," and a pretty good group of actors is wrecked—for me—by the intrusion of incessant loud noises that startle in the first 60 seconds, then become very unwelcome because they fill in for what could be/should be deeper development of character and plot.
And for the record, in horror movies you can't just make up rules on how to break a spell. Okay, a stake through the heart of a vampire is something you can rely that the audience doesn't need schooling on, but anything else needs to be either presented at the beginning and the characters need to accomplish (or not) that very thing. It's lazy (and it's cheating) to just make stuff up as we go along. We lose interest and any investment in what happens if the rules keep changing as the movie proceeds.
The kitten thing was actually funny, but I worried about the goat. I wasn't scaredjust worried.