Dagr

Wow...this is one of the worst movies I've seen this year so far. They jabber on and make YouTube content for F O R T Y straight minutes. I'm not sure why I continued to watch past thirty minutes but I did.

I truly regret not turning it off then.

At 41 minutes the movies tries and fails to get interesting.

At 45 minutes in...we turned it off. It was THAT bad.

It's so bad that I felt obligated to write a review to save anyone else contemplating watching this.

Do not waste your time on this folks.

I repeat. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS MOVIE.

And if you do, don't pretend you weren't warned.

I saw this title advertised and came here to check it out. It had like a 6 yesterday. So I got it and watched it. I don't understand where in the world they got the 6 from. Now it's a 4.9. And it had over 1k yesterday. Anyway, if it looks too good to be true it probably is...

So yeah. This has got to be one of the seemingly lowest budget films I've seen in a while. They like rented a mediocre, cheap villa in the English countryside, probably on Airbnb. And they rented 3 cars. And probably advertised on Craigslist for 2 main and 4 supporting actors... or wherever it is you get actors 'off the street' these days. I think the whole thing was shot like over a weekend. Less than a week, tops. They could have believably shot the whole thing in one day, like one of Willis' recent movies.

They went for a documentary style, of sorts, and probably really did use phones for the majority of the footage. I mean the premise was sort of interesting, and probably could have gone somewhere... but the whole thing was just like a high school movie final project that got a b-. That's the overall vibe I got from it. The main characters were annoying as hell. So they are famous social media performers/influencers who steal? Do you know how easy it would be for the police to get them? I'm not going to even... yeah.

The monster in the movie, I've seen middle-schoolers' Halloween costumes that put more effort into the concept and execution than this. And he kept repeating the same chant over and over again. Except it wasn't even chant-y sounding, or creepy in any way. It was like a guy repeating my take out order over the phone. I know what they were going for, but in this case, it was not scary or effective at all. It just became extremely annoying and ridiculous after the first encounter.

Ok, enough, like I said, I only watched this because I saw it had a 6 and read some of the obviously fake reviews. So I was waiting for it to get good, and by the time I lost all hope and realized it was fake I was more than halfway through so I just finished it. Ugh.

Trying to carry out a new prank, a pair of women on a massively popular prank channel decide to crash a commercial shoot in the countryside that looks abandoned, but when they go through the recovered footage from the shoot discover there's a deadly evil summoned to kill them and is now after them.

This was a decent enough effort if only let down by a few major factors. What works nicely here is the manner in which the reveal of what's haunting the house comes to be, which is quite effective and chilling. The occult rituals that were said to take place here with the past occupants of the house finding themselves battling this supernatural force only for the new girls to come across the same thing when they arrive makes for a fun time here. The encounters in the house that take place in the second half, where they not only face the robed figure but also see the influence of its actions on the film crew they thought they were interacting with makes for fun time as the use of a creepy location and chilling action makes for a frenetic and thrilling time. The main problem here is the exhausting and draining build-up to get there as this one really takes its toll getting to this point. Focusing on some of the vapidest and irritating social media personalities who are no more righteous than the people they claim to be committing these against makes for a tough time really caring about what's going on. That comes off even worse when they're positioned as the moral center of what's going on as the antics are said to be so popular, but given that hardly anything interesting is happening either with them or the other film crew on location before they arrive leaves this with little explanation or purpose and drains this one overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.

I like this genre: found footage horror with a dose of self awareness. But, the lead in is WAAAAYYYYY too long and it definitely doesn't need to be given how little info you actually need to understand for the film premise to make sense. Seemed like they were trying to kill time in order to make it a full feature. There are so. Many. Driving. Shots. Also a lot of talking to random farm animals that they encounter. In general I feel like the two main actors (the thieving girls) are meant to be cute-bubbly sorts but they are also a bit annoying, think Kitty and Lydia from Pride and Prejudice 2005. I think this is mostly the case though because there is so much filler so they are talking and exclaiming a lot but it's very unfocussed/doesn't need to be in the film. That being said, still giving 5 stars because it does get some good creepy bits in and there are some interesting story points in the second half of the film. But you can pretty much read the synopsis and skip the first half of the film without missing a beat.

Despite its short runtime, "Dagr" manages to bore the viewers within a short timespan. As a matter of fact, you have to sit through more than half the film before some attempts at horror tropes appear. This is just one of the more tangible evidences of Matthew Butler-Hart's struggles with the writing and direction of "Dagr". Whatever his point with this film was (I'm sure he had one) is not displayed even at the slightest. Some sort of social commentary? Who knows? When the folk horror themes is unraveled at the end, no answers are given anyways due to its convolution. And yes, we've seen the found-footage-within-a-found-footage horror movie trick before.