What Happened at 625 River Road?

Packed with nuance and carefully planned delivery, What Happened at 625 River Road delivers layers upon layers of creepy speculation led by a cast that keeps you guessing all throughout. The friendship we see is heartwarming and honest-girls living their best lives and unafraid to take risks. The brilliantly voiced Ms. Johnson who greets them at the airbnb gives the viewer a gut punch of WTF sinister vibes with her dark demeanor turned silky, refined sweetness. She became my favorite character as we slowly come to see she's got her own backstory. The detective isn't totally fooled by the gorgeous woman he meets at the house, but he's taken enough to believe her concern, and it all feels completely on point until things take a turn. The shots all throughout twist and pan as beautifully as a music video, giving a thrilling and super fresh edge to the storytelling. In all, a completely fresh surprise in modern horror/suspense, expertly delivered by the actors. It's not just the obvious tropes "ie what's in the locked basement" but the reality of risky circumstances in party culture... "are people really who they say they are?" "Are these men here just for the sex?" All in all, I felt like this film delivered a carefully wrought story with very fine acting especially via the parts of Ms. Johnson (Silvana Jakich) and Detective Nickels (Matrell Smith). Excited to see what Devon Jovi Johnson comes up with next.

The story itself is decent but the acting is so bad that it borders on comedic. The girl who plays Laura is okay but the one who plays Kelly is just bad. I hated the camera angles too. It screamed B movie but not in a good way. It's like they were intentionally trying to make it look bad.

This isn't a horror movie or a scary movie in any way. The story line moves too fast with a lot of missed opportunities for any kind of build up. It's the typical Airbnb story that goes wrong. But it jumps around to so many different people that there's no real story to follow.

There's zero character development so you really don't care what happens to anyone. And the parts that finally get going, the camera zooms in and out of people's faces, goes up and down and all around in a very Blair Witch kind of way that's just annoying.

This is one of those movies that had a lot of promise but went the other way and just failed.

The way it was edited, does make it a little bit confusing to follow. I get it's a mystery unsolved, but rather than flashes to things that happened, and a little bit more explaining at the end would have gone a long way. Like with the detective giving what he thought happened, and what they found at the house.

I loved the first night in the house, and shots from the outside with strange movements and shadowy figures. It looked really great and really added to tension of the film. It was a really interesting way of doing it, and I think it worked well.

The production value seemed pretty good and so did the acting.

So let me start by saying that the overall story here is good. Without giving anything away, there's 2 stories happening, which you'll see at the end if you get through it.

The execution is really bad though. If you can get through the level of acting without switching it off, you should be able to finish it, because it's only about 75 minutes long, and even at 75 minutes long, there is a long of extraneous stuff, and I am wondering if this was one of those movies where it really wasn't long enough to be a feature, but they extended some scenes to make it into one. The plot they have is large enough where they shouldn't have had to do that, but it's low budget...maybe they had trouble getting additional locations, etc.

What could have potentially been a good film was sadly completely ruined by the abysmal acting. I don't know if it was dubbed, or if this was actors actually voicing the dialogue, either way every line from every actor was delivered with a total lack of emotion or tonal change.

The story itself was interesting and had huge potential to something worthy of a 7 or 8 star review. It would be interesting to see a big name look to remake this with a bigger budget and better cast, as i think in the right hands this could've been something special.

As it is, i'm giving it 4 stars purely based on that potential and the overall story.

Is it worth a watch? I would say so, but please, do not expect anything of any real standard.