The Reeds

If you can get past the thick accents (this is a British flick), THE REEDS is not half-bad. A group of young people are on a boating cruise, and end up running afoul of some less-than-pleasant locals. Plotwise, we're in WRONG TURN territory, only on water instead of solid ground. The gore is minimal, although the suspense builds pretty well. Very low budget, so don't expect anything out of the ordinary. As I recall, this film was running back to back or concurrently on another channel with PRIMEVAL, the Aussie or New Zealand flick about a killer croc. I have to say in all honesty that I prefer PRIMEVAL. But why not watch them both and decide for yourself.

A weekend boating party turns into a nightmare for a group of young Londoners when they stumble upon a terrifying secret hidden in the reeds.

This film is troubled for one reason: it makes absolutely no sense. Burned dog, bloody make-out parties, caged remains underwater... even as we find out more about the story, it makes no sense. I cannot get into any real depth without revealing too much, but I will say if you are waiting for answers, you will not find many.

That major caveat being said, the film itself is a fine piece of work -- good acting, good cinematography, good music and lighting. All that can go into a film to make it good has been done here, but the story just was not done right.

A group of young, beautiful people take a trip into the unknown. This time they venture into THE REEDS, where they encounter juvenile delinquents, terror, and death.

At first, the viewer might believe they've entered into another "killer kids from hell" movie. Actually, this is a chilling supernatural tale with plenty of dread and impending doom. The twisty finale is the black icing on the whole ghoulish cake.

Recommended for the true fear fan...

As usual some of these reviews seem placed by people attached to the project! There's a lot of Love or Hate hmmmm. This is often the case with these lower budget films but...

For what its worth, this is a solidly performed low budget horror with a less than solid conclusion. The journey is fun to watch and compelling although the cinematography is slightley dated.

For high-end scares / gore / violence (those things you expect from indie horror) you may find this lacking. But then so are most big budget Hollywood offerings.

If you like the genre, this is far from the worst flick out there. Worth a spin. ******

To be honest, the movie at first really doesn't seem like a bad one at all. The first few minutes are nothing too great but at least it makes you think that its going to head into something decent and watchable, if only a tad bit formulaic. But as it turned out in the end, the movie was just an incredibly bad one.

The movie is just very poorly done. It's an extremely bad handled horror-film, that tries to go into many different directions but none of them ever work out for one bit.

A problem already lies with its concept. Seriously, what is so scary about the reeds in this movie, even though all of the characters try to make it seem like it's one of the scariest places to be in and they constantly get a bad feeling about things, just by driving a boat, at clear day. The movie its 'horror' really relies on its concept and settings, which were already incredibly lacking to begin with.

But the biggest problem of the movie simply is the story itself. The movie is given a whole bunch of side-plots, which makes the movie as a whole all the more messy and confusing. And the movie already gets an incredibly messy and confusing one to begin with, during its second half. First of all, the movie is so incredibly dark that you can hardly tell what's going on, on screen and who's where and most importantly why. And second of all, lots of stuff just doesn't make sense. Like mentioned earlier, the movie combines lots of different horror elements, in an attempt to keep things interesting and also surprising but instead it makes things incredibly messy. You see people constantly running and looking scared, a ghostly figure appears, a strange sound can be heard but there is actually very little happening in the movie. It's not a boring one, the movie is too fast going for that but there is nevertheless not a whole lot happening in this movie.

No way that this movie will please any horror fans, despite the fact that it still has basically all of the right ingredient in it, to make a decent, watchable horror film out of. The execution of it all is however far too poor and lacking for any of the horror to ever work out. The atmosphere is too dark, since you can't even tell what is happening, there is no gore, no effective scare moments and no real originality to it all, though the movie tries really hard to be. horror fans should simply stay away from this, as should everybody else.

A failed attempt.

3/10

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