Vdova

I am having a hard time getting through this movie. It's not really a Blair Witch clone, but something obviously inspired by it. The story seems like it might be interesting, but the dubbing is a crime unto itself, making the movie near unwatchable. It's like someone took a horror movie and then get laid the soundtrack to an old Scooby Doo episode over top. Absolutely atrocious.

I think I will restart from the beginning with the TV muted, closed captions on, and maybe try to synch up Dark Side of the Moon, see how that works. I want to watch it, but I don't want characters in mortal terror sounding like a high school cheer squad.

Firstly: I hate Blair Witch copies, and pretty much anything depending on shaking handheld cameras.

The first 15 minutes or so was therefore quite challenging.

The Movie is not the gore/slasher/evil type of horror, it is simply creepy. The buildup, the characters, the atmosphere: great!

I do believe this movie is under-rated, 3.9? I give it an easy 7.

In fact, it is probably better but I started of expecting crap and the first section lived up to the expectation.

On the second viewing, the annoyance was gone, and the creep factor was pure entertainment. My spawn got all wrapped up and ranted in monologues about how things are not supposed to be like that! Fun, fun, Fun!

I was forced to watch it dubbed, as AmazonPrime only had dubbed version. The dubbing was anime-quality, absolutely atrocious.

The story itself took much longer to get to its central hook than I expected, and once it did get there, it proceeded to do very little. Pretty much almost nothing actually happened apart from the finding of the old woman naked in the woods, Zoya. It's from her repeated ramblings that we pretty much get all the real exposition.

Beyond that, nothing that actually happened seemed in any way connected to the "The Widow" concept at all. We barely even see much of anything beyond some musical stings, people acting strangely, and eyes going black.

The image on the poster is essentially a lie, as nothing appears in the film that looks like that. This whole thing has elements of The Blair Witch Project, but with somehow even less actual stuff going on.

Well, from the movie's rating on IMDb and a relatively interesting movie cover/poster, I must admit that I was expecting this movie to be something worthwhile watching.

But it wasn't. This was a snoozefest of epic proportions. Nothing, and I mean that literally, nothing of any worth happened throughout the course of the prolonged and intolerable 45 minutes of suffering I sat through before I just gave up on the movie given the total sense of boredom that permeated the movie.

Sure, the movie was off to an interesting start with the rescue team roaming about the countryside looking for the lost boy Nikita, and then the found the mysterious woman instead and the movie just slipped down a very slippery slope and never recovered. The movie went from being relatively interesting to being a boring event in an instant.

As for the storyline in the movie, well, forget about it, because there isn't really much of anything here. And whatever little there was present in the storyline was just brutally killed by the permeating boredom and sense of pointlessness that oozed from every single scene.

And little did it help that the characters felt like faceless drones milling about. I couldn't tell the characters from one another, not that it really mattered, because the characters had no personalities, no background stories, no traits or quirks to make the unique. It was just a faceless swirl of bodies running around with no aim or purpose. So whatever happened to the characters in the 45 minutes of suffering I sat through didn't matter one ounce.

If you enjoy horror movies, then "The Widow" (aka "Vdova") is not a movie that I would recommend you wasting your money, time or effort on. Some of us did in smaller or greater extend - depending on your tolerance level of watching rubbish - so you don't have to.

This movie was a massive swing and a miss from writers Natalya Dubovaya, Ivan Kapitonov and Ivan Minin. It is actually sort of impressive that not one, but three writers, could collectively manage to churn out something this dreadful.

My rating of "The Widow" lands on a more than generous two out of ten stars, and that is based solely on the atmosphere that there was to the movie. Everything else here was just pointless. And having suffered through 'only' 45 minutes of this ordeal, I can honestly say that there is nothing to lure me back to finish watching the rest of this pointless movie.

This is a good movie that is deeply wounded by terrible dubbing. It would've been much better off subtitled. The dubbing alters the mood and turns what, no doubt, is a creepy movie oozing atmosphere into a much lighter adventure. For example a minor role of a young boy sounds like a cartoon mouse and there are instances of laughing or other non-word utterances like oohs and ahs that sound on!y cartoony. But it's not just these instances but the entire dialogue that is ruined. It comes off sounding more like an episode of Scooby Doo and less like the tense and atmospheric folk horror that is is.

A subtitled version of this movie would gain at least a star and possibly two but as it stands now its a real stretch to give it the six I did. I do think it's potentially a great little movie and I tried hard to ignore the laughable dubbing when rating it.