Truly Imbecilic

Rating: 1/10 (30 April 2003)

Well, this film left me depressed, not because it was creepy, but because it was so stupid and at the same time so cynical. I may say that there is not a single thing in this picture which makes any sense or has any genuine humanity in it. The monster is an evil little girl, but there is never the slightest indication to suggest why the girl is so evil or so powerful - indeed, precisely the sort of silence which is a certain giveaway that the picture has been made by people with adolescent mentalities, for adolescents. You posit some sort of monstrosity, and that's all there is to it, nothing more need be said. "Okay, like, there's this evil little girl with incredible powers...?" To give but two instances of the astonishing illogic which characterizes the film. For one, the mysterious video which is killing people is said to have been imprinted from the evil girl's memories. But the video is full of images of things that the girl could not possibly have seen. For another, the characters are horrified to realize that it is a terrible calamity that her skeleton has been taken from the well, because somehow this means that now she is free to wreak her evil upon the world and kill people. But she has been wreaking her evil upon the world and killing people even with her skeleton at the bottom of the well! Oh, I'm sorry, apparently she can now actually drag her ugly carcass out of the television set and kill people instead of killing them from inside the television set. But perhaps her identically melted-face victims would not consider this such an important distinction. Then there is the clerk who manages the cabins and upon whose shelf the evil video is found - the curious fellow who plays him is given a nice little character-actor turn, interacting with the blonde lady who is the star, trying to perform card tricks, and so forth - and then we never see him again! What the heck was that about? What was his part in the sinister events, what was the video doing on his shelf? We never learn! We never see him again! You see, it is as if the screenplay for this film was written, scene by scene, without any reference to anything that had been written before, certainly not with any intention to exercise the slightest logic or continuity, but merely to work certain changes upon the psyche of the filmgoer, who is presumed to be a teen-ager, I suppose, and who is certainly held in utter contempt. And here is the real horror, that the film wants nothing from you but your money, and has no meaning other than to trick you into pushing some bills through the slot at the box office.