I am a nice person. I am kind. I do not like to criticize because I know that when people create things, they put their energy, their creativity, and their time, money, and wishes into them. But this movie is so terrible I must criticize it. My apologies to the gods of film review kindness.
It starts with a fantastic story idea. I love the story idea and somehow I had it in my head that this would be like one of those wonderful Stephen King stories that are about kindness and the good things in mankind that contrast with the bad things. I think this story idea had that same sort of thing in mind, but the screenplay was so terrible, I sat here thinking it is quite possible that my cat could've written a better screenplay. She is a smart cat, although I have never seen her writing.
I utterly despise soap operas and have never made it through one episode of one though I gave it a valiant effort. I would rather watch a soap opera than a movie like this. The story was probably at the level of a fourth or fifth grader. I am not making a joke. It was incredibly juvenile with the characters completely flat and one-dimensional. There was not a molecule of good or of inner conflict in any of the truly evil characters. And the good characters were saintly. There was no real motivation for all of the horrible things the evil characters did. The motivation that the story did provide would've been carried out very different ways. The actions of the antagonists in this story were ridiculously evil at a level that you just don't see in real life. No adults would take in this story and say, "yes, those bad guys really need to be stopped!" Indeed, what an adult would wonder about is exactly what kind of brain injury the antagonists in the story had sustained to cause them to be so simpleminded and illogical in their evil doings. And there were so many of those characters. A small town with some incredibly evil people. Nonsensically evil.
I have no idea if the actors have any skill, but it is impossible for me to believe that they had anything to do with how bad this film is. It is simply statistical nonsense to suggest that every actor in this ghastly thing is a terrible actor. They would have, by sheer chance, found one or two good actors for the film if they had actually been looking for bad actors. You cannot make a Rolex watch from a few pieces of wire and gears that you found in an auto salvage yard. I think the screenplay is of such low quality that the finest actors in the world would've looked terrible in this film.
I cannot tell if the direction was good or not, but I suspect it was not very good. I wrote a few screenplays in my past and you always include a few instructions for direction in them. But the director has some freedom, of course. There were some very weird instances in this film where the timing did not make any sense or times where a character had no awareness of what was going on just a few feet from him. Also, characters did not look at or intervene in situations. The dance between directing and screenplay is a complicated one that I know very little about. And I don't know how much freedom the director had, but if it was a skilled director, it must've been terrible for him to direct this awful thing. Just as terrible as it was for the actors, no doubt.
I am pretty sure my six-year-old granddaughter could have written more realistic dialogue. I cannot get my time back, but in an effort to be a positive force in humanity I must humbly suggest to any reader here that instead of putting time and a few dollars into watching this film, you get out all your sweaters, sit down, and pluck those little lint balls off them. There will be four advantages to this activity. Your sweaters will look pristine, you will be much richer with three or four dollars you don't spend renting this film, you won't lose that little bit of IQ that surely dissolves from taking in such a bad story, and you will be much more amused by the plucking of lint than watching this film.
