Dullsville horror

Rating: 4/10 (27 October 2014)

I was bored during long periods of this film. The dull setting, spare dialog and humdrum lives of the characters didn't help matters. A woman loses her husband in a car crash when he is driving her to the hospital to have her son. Somehow, five years later, this contributes to a visitation by a spiky-handed monster via a storybook. The only reason I can see that the movie is collecting so much praise is because it represents a more woman-centred world than do most horror genre films. It is a bit like The Shining but a lot of the scenes (cockroaches behind the fridge which disappear when someone else arrives) are straight out of cliché central. In fact, that's how I would sum it up: it's The Shining minus Jack Nicholas. There is an unusual ending which is some compensation but it doesn't quite make up for wasting 90 minutes of my life.