The Legend of Bloody Mary

Honestly, I'm not one to criticize movies but this one influenced me to begin. I could have done better and the only movie I have directing experience in was for a project in sixth grade. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case with 70% of all new horror releases and I have been quite the horror fanatic for twenty years.

While the plot was as unoriginal and boring as most other B rated horror movies these days, the acting was the ignition for this bomb to explode. Every time Brittany Miller made a phone call and attempted to act, I would cringe in my seat as that was the true horror of the movie. The acts also bounced around everywhere, turning terrible into nearly unwatchable. I've never heard myself say aloud while watching a movie, "Oh, come ON!" As in, hurry up and get to the point already. The characters seemed to take forever in discovering anything.

Twice I found myself holding the remote reaching my finger towards the stop button and literally had to force myself through the rest by true willpower. As an example of how bad the writing was for LoBM, take these lines for example: Character 1: "I don't know what I could do without you!" Character 2: "I don't know! What would you do?!" HE JUST SAID HE DIDN'T KNOW! I found myself laughing at these from start to finish, sadly.

These people need to stop making movies and completely destroying the horror market. I would rather watch Trailer Park of Terror thirty times in a row than have to sit through this one a single time again if that tells you anything. Please... No more Mary remakes.

I give this movie a strong 2 out of 10. It's even lucky to even get a 2. Heck, i'll just give them an extra point for trying. The movie has HORRIBLE acting, the frequent pause in every conversation. They "fail" to even act as they are scared and other emotions that are common in all horror thriller movies. The scary scenes are not even worth the jump unless your a 5 year old just coming into the game of horror.

I even think the last attempt of the Mary Warren movie which I think was published on 2005 or earlier was a a lot better. I stopped watching it after 30mins, yes! I said THIRTY MINUTES! This movie is not worth anybody's time, not even to someone with all the free time in the world.

Trying to overcome his constant nightmares, a man and his friends use the root cause of his sister's disappearance playing an urban legend and find the spectral being they summoned is connected to her and try to stop her rampage.

Overall, this one is quite a missed opportunity that really doesn't get much right going. The fact that this one manages to really get invested in the back-story for the urban legend and tries to explain it does get some favors here with this settling on the wrongly-accused witch in colonial times as the subject matter, and the scene depicting this time are where it really starts getting good with the entire sequence played out as a mindless torture sequence really revealing in the gore and brutality inflicted upon her that starts this chain of events that it gets this off on a great note. Not only is this fully warranted for her wanting revenge, but the brutality alone is quite enjoyable, and while it's not in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the movie it still works quite well in delivering the gory goods. Beyond that, there's not a lot to really get invested with since the majority of the screen-time is taken with the duo tracking her down managing to investigate the sightings without really getting anything out of the film beyond those brief moments where the play-out of one of the investigations yields some rather tense images. By staying so focused on the investigation, there's not a lot of chances for the slasher to really be invested in this one and therefore it goes long periods of time without getting her on-screen or even involved with the goings-on in the story, and when it does happen it's usually in the form of long, unneeded showings of what happened to his sister years ago that sets off the whole search nowadays but doing so back-in-time, shuttling back-and-forth in the time-line so much it's hard to get a true handle on where you are it's done so much. This is the series of scenes that are supposed to sort out the thrills and suspense from her actions, but instead nothing all that interesting happens and the lengthy set-pieces for these scenes really undoes it all. Coupled with that lack of screen-time and this is a lot worse off than it really should be.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity.

The title of my review pretty much sums it up, but since I have to write at least 10 lines, here goes. You will not want to watch this movie if you want to see: 1.) fast pacing at any moment in the movie, 2.) fluent dialogue, 3.) smooth editing, 4.) good acting, 5.) suspenseful build-ups, 6.) more or less stable image that doesn't induce seasickness, 7.) good CGI.

I also can't recommend this movie to people susceptible to claustrophobia, because half of the time the camera is pretty much shoved almost into the faces of the actors for no reason whatsoever. It gives the feel that everything was recorded in rooms barely large enough to hold both the actors and the filming crew.

There are some scenes of people walking and driving cars, with no other apparent purpose than to lengthen the duration of the movie, even though the pacing is already sleep-inducing on its own. Some of these scenes are accompanied by music that feels out of place, unless you accept that this movie is geared towards a young teenage audience. These scenes look like a typical karaoke video but without the scrolling lyrics.

The whole thing feels like separate parts which were just concatenated, without any attempt to get the pacing right. I'm not just talking about the different scenes, even within a single scene it's as if they recorded all the actors sequentially, making them say all their lines at once, and then interleaved these video streams. As a result, there are frequent unnatural and awkward pauses between sentences.

And then there's the shaky cam, which is used at all the wrong moments. During a simple conversation between two characters, it's as if the camera man gets progressively more drunk and eventually is unable to track his subject even though it is sitting still in a chair.

Even the sound has a low-budget quality to it. The clearly audible different background noises on the dialogue of actors in the same scene support my theory that each actor acted all their lines sequentially. They could at least have mixed some extra consistent background noise over the entire scene to mask this.

My threshold for a movie that has something still making it worth watching is 5/10. I give this one a 3. There were some scenes that came remotely close to being scary, and the historical parts looked pretty good. But for the rest it felt like the filming project of a bunch of high school kids.

Bloody Mary always intrigued me. In fact I always thought it would make a good movie someday! Well, guess what? Three movies have been made, but the good movie still has yet to come. Funny, because before putting this in I told myself "Eh, this couldn't be any worse than that other Bloody Mary movie." HA! Fooled myself there! Don't know where to begin with this. Scares and chills are completely nonexistent, pace is very slow between all the stories being told, and between the relationship drama and the sucky music I almost felt I was watching an MTV original show! And that is all I need to say, my friends. Don't need to tell you more except don't waste your time.