Monster

I am a fan of the idea of having a film use no dialogue. (Characters only sometimes say the names of other characters, so at least the main actors are more likely to get fairly compensated as speaking parts.) I don't mind the campy fake blood as long as there is suspense and a good storyline. Cinematography definitely had good moments of creating suspense. Only twice in the film did I find myself in a moment that seemed laughable and took me out of my immersion. One was a "The Shinning" spoof of the "Here's Johnny" scene that played out impressively well, especially by a young child actress in the place of Duvall, but even in its abbreviated form, the scene is just too long to not be a bit dull and out-of-place. The other moment was when our main character stops herself from stealing some french-fries left behind by an antagonist and pouts. I can see how they intended to make this a moment of showing human-ness and generating pity for the child, but it instead came off as an out-of-place moment of levity. I can forgive those things however. The thing that really irked me was the stereotypes used to depict the "badguy" archtype; Joint-smoking, beer-drinking gamer playing violent MMO shooters late into the night, has long unkempt hair and a black baseball cap or hoody with open jacket and ripped jeans, sustaining on cup noodle and fast food, neglecting an otherwise gorgeous home that is taken for granted and absolutely infested with cockroaches. And let's not forget this is supposed to be a child predator. It's just hitting every checkmark for a bad stereotype. When we got our second villain in the story, things started to pick up with suspense.

Monster (2023) is a remake of the 2020 movie "The Boy Behind The Door" and while that movie was nothing spectacular but pretty decent, this one is just an absolute mess. Two children are being abducted and wake up in a secluded cabin with their captor lingering around. After the little girl manages to free herself prepare to shake your head continually. The decisions made in this movie are absolutely terrible. While you could excuse the children for being young and not knowing better this does not apply to the villains. There are so many scenes where the Threat doesn't even feel real because of these decisions made. The movie also doesn't have dialogue which does not contribute in making this any better. The movie had some decently tense situations and there was a small potential hidden somewhere in this, however the overall execution is rather laughably. [4,5/10]

If you seen the US movie "The Boy Behind the Door" then you know what I am talking about. This is literally a replica with no dialogue. Not sure if they intended for this to be a remake or not but this version is terrible. I do give kudos to the girl in the movie, she can definitely go far with her acting when she gets older. The suspense in the beginning is good at times but then I'm like, this is giving me Deja vu because I've seen this already. This movie shouldn't have been made but I guess when there's nothing else to watch on a Friday night and you want to kill time then this is it lol...

I enjoyed this movie for what it was it's kept me engaged and it was suspenseful. I don't think people can handle the lack of dialog but I thought the actor's performance was good I didn't have to have dialog to understand what was going on and enjoy the movie. The little girls is such a baddie! My only complaint was the music was a little misleading sometimes. Example sometime it sounded like someone was knocking on the door when they weren't, but over all it was a decent flick. If you like suspenseful movies I say give it a go, the jump scares were predictable if horror is you genre but overall fun watch.

"Monster" is an okay movie, I guess. Wait, on second thought, it's not that great. It starts out as a rather unpleasant watch. Then after while, it gets repetitious. It never gets boring but it does get stuck in second gear. The first half of the movie is better than the second half. The no dialogue is fine for a while but then it ends up being a silly, rather ineffective gimmick. For a movie with a very friendly running time (86 minutes), "Monster" begins to feel like a long movie. 86 minutes long or not, it should have been about twenty minutes shorter. "Monster" is another straight-to-Netflix dud.