Needless to say that I had never heard about this 2022 horror movie which seemed to be including the entire Zavaleta in one function or another on or off camera. But with it being a horror movie, and my love of the horror genre, of course I opted to check out the movie, even without not knowing what I was in for here.
The movie's cover was actually interesting enough to make me pick it up, and thus I came to know about this movie from writer and director Juan Daniel Zavaleta.
The narrative in the movie was pretty sluggish, and it felt somewhat like a college film class project. I have to admit that I never found that legless apparition, well Sadako clone from "The Ring" actually, as being remotely scary, all it did was just linger around in the scenes.
Every single scene in the movie that is supposed to be scary essentially falls to the ground without any effect. For some reason every character in the movie that get to see the apparition and get spooked by it, just merely sits or stands there afterwards, staring blankly at the place where the apparition appeared and merely shrugs it off as it is a daily occurrence in the neighborhood. And that just makes the scenes pointless. Writer and director Juan Daniel Zavaleta sets up the scene well enough, but just stumbles over his own directing and kills the scary moment.
Some of the dialogue is cringeworthy and the delivery from the actors and actresses didn't exactly help to make it all the more believable as proper dialogue between two or more people. And the grandmothers dialogue was just so cliché that it was difficult not to laugh as she delivered it.
Of course I was not familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list in this 2022 horror movie. The acting performances were a very mixed bag of nuts; because some of the performances were fair, not great mind you, but fair, while others were dubious.
You should actually watch "Haunted Valley" two times. Watch the movie for the story and the movie itself the first time you watch it. And the second time you watch it, count the number of times that actor Gabriel Aaron Zavaleta, playing Aaron, steps into a scene and just stands around slack-jawed and staring blankly into the air.
"Haunted Valley" is a swing and a miss of a horror movie. But points given to writer and director Juan Daniel Zavaleta for trying.
My rating of "Haunted Valley" lands on a two out of ten stars.
