Noisy and stupid movie ends with a bit of real drama.

Rating: 5/10 (18 January 2013)

This is a movie in which every few minutes there is a burst of really loud and annoying noise, usually matched with something rushing toward you too fast to make out. Not until the ending do you get a good look at what was lurking around for the previous hour of so.
There is little or nothing happening in the movie except that the lurking monster is gradually revealed as the kinds, who are the protagonists, have different attitudes toward it. The shame of the film is that this difference of opinion is of no significance until the final scene, when is should have been the focus of the film instead of the squabbling guardians. There lurks and interesting tale.
There are a number of dangling threads and oddities in the movie which might well have been tied up. The house, for example, in which the children are left has a name by the door, Helvetia, which is a name for Switzerland, but which does not appears again except for a brief glimpse. We are supposed to believe that the children subsisted on cherries, a crop that is highly seasonal and not available when the action takes place, at least not available to those with no access to modern food distribution systems. The woods are filled with brilliant white lights which cast ominous shadows for the convenience of people stumbling around at night. There is also a vast archive in the courthouse of a small Pennsylvania county which nicely symbolic, but rather over done.
Leaving such threads aside the real story, which does not depend on anything that took place in the bulk of the film except for one child's affection for her rescuers, only begins after a curiously pointless encounter in the house in the woods and a second glimpse of the Helvetia sign. It would be an excellent story to be told by someone with a talent for scary movies that are actually worth watching, someone like, oh, I don't know, maybe del Toro or someone like that, if there is anyone like that. What little there is of this ending might well be the basis for a much better movie to be made at a later date and is almost worth sitting through all the noisy noise in rest of this thing.