Portals

I've watched hundreds of bad movies. Finally, after 37 years of life, I have watched a movie so absolutely horrible that I felt the need to create an IMDB account to review one.

I hope that others like me, those who can happily sit through a bad movie and appreciate it for it's most basic entertainment value, see this review and know to stay away. Don't say you weren't warned.

I watched it for free on Crackle and I still think I'm due a refund.

They sure know how to make effective trailers nowadays, they totally fooled me. Decent, noteworthy directors orchestrating a movie produced by my favorite horror medium & "Portals" was the result - I am indeed very disappointed.

I was deciding on what to watch with my sister, "Portals" had just came out, so I showed her the trailer & it's a nice trailer, nothing too impressive, but certainly intriguing. So started 80 minutes of a regressive horror entertainment. "Portals" take place during a series of world-wide blackouts, followed by mysterious cosmic anomalies popping up all over the globe & they scare some people and draw others in. Directors involved have previously gifted us a few good movies including "The Night Comes for Us", "Blair Witch Project" and the less than good "Beyond Skyline". To start positively, the qualities of "Portals" include some (not all) cool and creative production design / cinematography choices, dark sci-fi sound design and decent enough acting. Sadly, the script contains very little substance, moves at a snails pace and will very likely leave you dissatisfied or even irritated. Frankly, "Portals" doesn't make any sense and doesn't even compensate by being effectively ominous, eerie, open-ended or just the good kind of style-over-substance. It's hard to fish for the best in this movie, because nothing really excels, but the cake probably goes to Timo Tjahjanto for the segment of "Sarah" - stretched out and underwhelming, but better on the background of everything else.

"Portals" angered me which not a lot of movies manage to do, it would've been better already by just cutting off 20 minutes from the runtime. Hardcore sci-fi horror fans, cosmic horror fans, forgiving anthology fans - you can try to have a go at this but beware, it's extremely lacking of literally everything. My rating: 3/10.

The concept had potential but the implementation failed miserably. It was told as a series of stories which led to a disjointed and confusing anticlimactic end. I doubt the writers had much more than a 5th grade education and certainly never had a class in writing drama. And, who read this script and thought,"Yes, that sounds good!"? Just wow! The actors were OK, the cinematography was decent, even the background music was passable. But the story just didn't have enough legs to go anywhere. It was obvious the writers had no real concept at all and so the individual stories never became cohesive. The whole thing kind of came off as an indy-art-house picture with no real substance. Don't waste your time.

In a word? Boring. Monoliths inexplicably turn up all over the world with inexplicable consequences. That's it really. No one seems to know what's going on. Not the characters. Not the actors. Not the director and certainly not the writers. A genre so bent that NOTHING makes sense and it's all a complete waste of your time.