O Chapeleiro do Mal

Oh but it was funny. The terrible acting, the weird lighting, the even weirder camera angles, the story (or lack thereof)... this film was a mess basically. The characters were all equally unlikeable as your overused tropes: typical shy guy with no charisma, the nice girl who feels the need to remind you her parents are dead, a scream queen (a girl with no purpose other than to scream at everything), and then the boyfriend who we never can remember the name of. We laughed, we zoned out, and the story made no sense. The end.

This film seemed to have all the ingredients: credible characters, atmospheric set, decent music. The story was begging to come out, but whoever was putting it together fumbled the ball very badly. Who were the caretakers? What was the deal with the little bunnies or beavers being skinned? Was the hatter mad because of chemicals that used to go into the hats? Instead we got a boring repeat of the boy's sister drowning over and over, with the other three student background stories equally lame.

Yes. It's a low budget affair. But honestly, I've seen far worse acting out of many Hollywood A-listers. The score is apt. The direction is solid. The story is, while underdeveloped, quite interesting in my opinion. The film doesn't beat you senseless with cgi. There are some pretty good special effects. Lighting is solid. Character development is minimal, but it really doesn't detract from the film. Maybe five out of ten is a bit much, but it's nice to see this very unique spin on "The Mad Hatter".

This film (if you want to call it that) started out boring worked into extreme boring and then surpassed itself by being even more boring.

Wow. Just wow.

I was lured in on the premise of the movie's title, which turned out to be a ruse. So don't succumb to that very same mistake. While this abysmal movie might actually be based on contents of the original story, don't fall into the pit and get suckered in to watch this atrocity of a movie.

The storyline told in this 2021 movie "The Mad Hatter", as written by R. V. Romero and Cate Devaney, was just a travesty. The whole script felt rushed and lacked a proper red thread throughout the course of the movie. And that made for a less than wholesome entertainment experience, let me just tell you that. In fact, the storyline here feels like the two writers sat down apart and wrote segments for the movie without corresponding and then had to piece the segments together afterwards. It was just a scrambled heap of an attempt of making a movie.

The acting in the movie was, I suppose, fair enough, given the fact that the actors and actresses had very little to work with in terms of a proper script or interesting characters. Now, the movie has Michael Berryman on the cast list, so that counted for something and that was also one of the reasons why I sat down to watch "The Mad Hatter". But as luck would have it, he wasn't given much screen time, so don't get your hopes up.

"The Mad Hatter" is listed as a thriller and horror movie. Sure, if you are new to the genre, then you might get some thrills from this movie, or even be mildly scared. But for a horror veteran, such as myself, "The Mad Hatter" was just a swing and a miss.

Sure, the production value of the movie was actually good, but that hardly matters when a movie is devoid of a properly entertaining script and storyline, or lacking interesting characters or scary moments.

This is by no means a movie that I would recommend you rush out to waste your time, money or effort on. It was a movie that fell short of delivering on all parameters.

My rating of "The Mad Hatter" lands on a mere two out of ten stars.