Curse of Crom: The Legend of Halloween

This PG-13 style horror movie is surprisingly not dumb. I don't know why, but despite the low budget and tired mythology Curse of Crom is entertaining and fun for a light watch. It is reminiscent of silly horror movies of the 1980s like The Gremlins or Ghoulies. I would not recommend it outside of the Halloween season, though - its charm is limited to holiday specific movies.

A group of high school students are just average people, they aren't obnoxious and disposable like slasher characters. The main character Mary has the WORST Republican step-dad in the world, though. Can you imagine telling a 17 year old to drive for Door Dash every night to pay for college, he tries to force her to skip hanging out with friends or celebrating Halloween. I kind of wish he met a different end, to be honest.

Out of respect for the people who worked on this low budget piece of crap movie, I give it three stars. But literally everything about it was terrible. If my review below won't convince you not to watch this movie, suit yourself, but I had to rant about how bad this was to get it out of my system :') which is also a sign of how extremely bad it was.

Music/backgroundnoises sounded like a child on a spooky synth keyboard. Acting so horrible it makes you physically cringe. The acting by the two main characters (the girl and boy teens) isn't the worst I've seen in lowbudget, but everyone else had the actingskills of a pornstar. The characters say the stupidest sht and do things in the strangest way, so the script seemed like a 10 year old's fanfiction... And the unnecessary family drama sideplot was so ridiculous!

The story sounded cool, an ancient Irish demon/monster chasing a bunch of teenagers. Original, sounds fun, you don't see many Irish demon movies. So I started watching, but immediately felt that typical low budget "acting is wooden and everything looks as if it's filmed with a cheap phonecamera" kinda thing. I looked it up on imdb and saw it got a 5,8 - not that bad for a B-horrorflick, I thought, because horror movies are generally rated lower than other genres - and (rounded up) a 6 usually means the movie isn't great but it's not bad either. Oooh, was it bad!

Randomly picked this movie with zero knowledge or expectations, and it delivered brilliantly! Word of advice, turn off closed captions to avoid hints during some scenes. But yeah, this was just a fun, slightly spooky, good for the whole family type of movie. Zero blood, no nightmare inducing murder clowns, no serial killers... just a ghostly monster and a gang of teena to solve a mystery. Me and my oldest enjoyed the heck out of it. Highly recommended to anybody who wants some Halloween fun. The naturalistic acting was great, even when they cranked up the comic relief, it was just the right balance of serious and comedy. Just watch it, you'll enjoy it.

I very much enjoyed this film, knowing nothing about it other than it was going to be about Halloween and feature practical effects.

I popped it into the Blu-ray player expecting some B-movie cheese and ended up watching a real movie. The story is more of a fantasy adventure than a horror film, which is just fine if you know that going in. The movie is family friendly, which isn't something I look for, but it definitely helped lend this a touch of Spielbergian charm.

The young cast is superb. I'd never heard of any of them before, but I hope they all go onto to bigger and better things.

The real highlight for me was the performance of star Chelsea Jurkiewicz. I never felt like I was watching a character, just a sweet girl caught up in a crazy home movie. She has a charm I can't describe, and I need to see more of her performances immediately.

I liked it. It's definitely not the best Halloween horror ever, but it's in an almost friendly and understated way entertaining. This is mainly thanks to the often deadpan humor with according funny dialogues and situations, and the overall good acting by the main cast. Chelsea Jurkiewicz is endearing as intelligent and exasperated Mary; Tanner Gillmann as bff Harvey is an absolute comic talent (and cute as a puppy!); and a special mention to Monica Moore Smith as the pristine and bewildered Stephanie. The story itself is a bit farfetched and complicated (an ancient Halloween demon pops up for some reason and has to be destroyed), but the sinister atmosphere with a ditto score is very effective. When the monster itself appears it's almost like looking at an ancient 60's horror flick, with someone in rubber suit in stead of topnotch CGI, but somehow that did't mar my appreciation, it gave it all a pleasant retro feel.