Meet Me There

The start of this film is so, so good and offers up the promise of a cheap but inventive psycho-horror. This proves not to be the case. Far from it, in fact.

Where to begin? Everything is shoddy! The acting is stilted with the lead actress in particular failing to match her emotions with the events occurring around her. The plodding, inane dialogue becomes an endurance test in unnecessarily long scenes. The director clearly has no idea how to use a camera to tell a story - his 'style' is a perfunctory point-and-shoot approach with some bad shot choices, awkward framing etc. The audio is terrible with much of the dialogue dubbed over.

Here's the perfect encapsulation of how clumsily and poorly put together this film is: you can hear the director call "Action!" at the start of one shot. How the hell do you make that sort of mistake?! How incompetent do you have to be to not catch that?

I won't say much on the plot because I'm not sure what the f*** was going on. I can deconstruct and explain the likes of Lynch's 'Lost Highway' and Kaufman's 'Synedoche, New York' with the best of them but I'm clueless as to what the muddled mess of an ending was about and nothing short of a loaded gun is gonna get me to go back and watch it again.

Ignore the high praise of the early reviewers. They're clearly friends and family of the film makers. Not only do many of them have the same location as the film makers (Texas) but they've also signed up just to review this film and talk it up as if it's the Second Coming of horror. It's not. It's truly awful.

Hovering somewhere between supernatural and psychological horror, "Meet Me There" is a welcome twist on the tropes that permeate both horror and independent film. A spectacular cold open filled with creeping dread sets the tone for the film, which specializes in leaving you unsettled and never fully answering all of your questions. This is a breath of fresh air in a genre that has lately taken great pains to over-explain everything, no matter how unsatisfying the answer. "Meet Me There" aspires to the lofty heights in both tone and quality of recent transcendent genre films "Beyond the Black Rainbow" and "Kill List" -- while also being nothing like either of those movies.

"Meet Me There" manages to squeeze terror out of a small town in the middle of nowhere, while presenting a pair of exceedingly likable protagonists that you actually want to root for -- another rarity in the genre. The largely-unknown cast really shines, while professional wrestler Dustin "Goldust" Runnels is a standout in an understated, sublime supporting role.

Witty dialogue, a master class in building tension waiting for the other shoe to drop and a talented hand guiding the production add up to a small-budget horror film that is worth going out of your way to experience.

This brought my fear of small towns and the south back to life. Is there a soundtrack? because all the songs in there were bops.

Okay I did fast forward quite a bit of this movie so some might say I should have been more patient. Really though I tried to but everything about this movie was just rubbish from the storyline to the acting, to the directing to the (the list goes on....)

This is only the 2nd review I have done on here but when all the other reviewers gave 8 to 10 stars I thought great, a new movie that really looks good and the fact it was supposed to be a horror with comedy mixed in made it even more promising.

Anyway if you don't believe me see for yourself and it will become evident that the other reviewers must be friends or family of the actors or are from the hills where they have no TV's and have never seen a good movie before.

I only gave this film 4 out of 10 but..... This film had real potential but was let down by extremely poor audio recording, somewhat poor continuity and bad camera work. You could put this down to the fact that the vast majority of the tasks (Producer, director,cinematographer, sound editor) were all performed by Lex Lybrand. The locations were well chosen and gave added punch to the creepiness of the film, but too bad the lack of stability on the camera and focus distracted this in many ways. In saying that, the story, however, was solid though acting a little weak - this could have been the director's fault though. Even though it came across as a "C" grade (maybe "B") film, I was still captured enough to watch the whole thing - it certainly had the creep factor. I still recommend watching it as supporting micro- budget films is a gateway for these filmmakers to continue to produce more content as well as learn more as they evolve their processes and technical abilities.