Strong and effective for the most part

Rating: Null/10 (25 February 2015)

I saw this when it first came out on DVD, and while I have forgotten a lot of movies I've seen as the years have passed, parts of this one really stuck with me. So I decided today to give it another look to see if it still had its bite. For the most part, it did. Though made for just $1.2 million, you could swear it was made for a lot more money - its look is utterly convincing. More importantly, it has the right feel and tone - it's bleak, horrific, graphic, and other adjectives that the best horror movies have.
Though the movie is definitely good, it could have been made to be even better. There are several sequences (mostly in the first half of the movie) where the movie exits the washroom and shows flashbacks to what happened to the characters earlier. In these parts of the movie, the horrific spell is temporarily broken and the movie goes through the motions until returning to the washroom. I wonder what the movie would be like if it had been set entirely in the washroom. Maybe better. Another problem with the movie is that there are two or three points where the direction gets extremely flashy and flamboyant, again breaking the movie's disturbing tone. Fortunately, these parts don't last very long. While all these problems are why I don't think the movie is a modern horror classic, I will say that despite these problems, the movie gets close to that desired status.