The Sandman

Well, for starters I will just say that this was not all that bad for a SyFy Channel movie actually. But with that being said, then I must also say that this was no outstanding experience in the horror genre either.

The storyline in "The Sandman" is fairly simplistic. An 8 year old girl is capable of invoking a nightmarish creature known as the Sandman, a creature that kills without a second thought. She has been put into custody with her aunt, and they must find a way to rid the girl of the nightmarish entity before it becomes too late.

Yeah, well on the surface it seemed like a fairly okay plot idea. The execution on the screen, however, told a different tale. The movie was fairly slow paced with nothing overly exciting happening throughout the course of the movie. And that meant that the entire movie experience felt rather prolonged and at times dull. Despite running at a standard feature length, this movie felt way longer.

The design of the Sandman was perhaps the best part of the entire movie. I liked the way they made him look, however, I would think if they had made sand continuously fall from him from various places, it would have be the icing on the cake. The face of the Sandman was quite interesting.

For a horror movie, then there wasn't an abundance of special effects throughout the course of "The Sandman", which puzzled med, because this definitely seemed like a movie that would have benefitted so much from having lots of special effects. However, the special effects they did have in the movie did work out well enough, and certainly served their intended purpose.

The acting in the movie was adequate, although it was mostly unknown and unfamiliar actors and actresses to me. I do like that in a movie, so it was a nice thing I think. They had Tobin Bell in the movie and lining on the movie's cover/poster. Just a shame that he was hardly in the movie. But hey, it was the biggest name in the movie, so why not brandish him on the cover?

Was "The Sandman" a scary movie? Hardly so, despite it being branded as a horror movie.

"Then Sandman" is the type of movie that you watch once, and never return to watch a second time, because the movie simply doesn't have enough contents to the storyline to support more than a single viewing.

An average SyFy release at best.

Then this movie might be for you.

This is one of those movies that is a fairly typical representation of what horror movies have devolved into - honestly, there appear to be more movies released in this genre than any other every year, but the majority are always rated as mediocre at best.

Typical unrealistic behavior from the characters, mediocre writing, cheap jumpscares that aren't actually scary but are very predictable, and just bad writing and acting.

I won't give any major spoilers, but let's just review the aunt's behavior in one scene. She comes home with the child, hears police across the street and with no reason why, she storms across the street, shoves her neighbors out of the way violently and rudely. She then gets confrontational with the cops all in order to just ask what happened, and then starts violently yelling at another cop because she remembers seeing him somewhere else. This behavior is borderline psychotic in the context within the movie and completely unrealistic in any way, but this isn't even the worst example of poor writing this has to offer - the child's acting is a lot worse.

This felt like a movie with a B budget, but then everything else was a solid C- at best. Sure, there are some positive reviews for it, but I suspect that those are from people that simply don't really pay attention to detail when watching movies - you know, they like to disengage the brain as if that is supposed to excuse sloppy movie making. If I have to pretend to be a moron to enjoy it, then guess what...

Woof. Bad writing, bad acting, bad effects... Just bad. And the annoying little girl wasn't trying to stop anything and didn't even act afraid. She just conjured up the Sandman to kill folks on a whim and looked like she enjoyed it. So unlikable. My sons and I did get entertainment value from making fun of it, but that's it.

There is so much to say about The Sandman, unfortunately it's nothing good, but then absolutely nothing good at all. Almost all ingredients to make a bad movie are present, bad actors, a bad script, bad editing, bad CGI's, just everything. From the beginning you immediately know this movie has been made for television, it just oozes amateurism, but it's still watchable. the more you get to the end the more ridiculous and bad it becomes, you just start commenting on everything bad that is happening, in other words you never shut up during the entire last half hour. The main actresses, Haylie Duff and Shae Smolik, are just horrible. Haylie Duff is even bad when she just have to make a facial expression without saying anything. There are some good kids as actors but Shae Smolik isn't one of them, on the contrary she's the opposite. I would suggest those two give up on their acting career, they're still hiring at McDonalds. The scenario wasn't great from the beginning but with the extreme bad CGI's and bad acting this movie just becomes more laughable than anything else. And yes I keep in mind this is a television production, so I don't have to have too high hopes, but I've seen good tv movies before and The Sandman isn't one of them.

Terrible graphics and even worse acting from the child. Predictable horror made for an awful movie.