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.

The script itself is really, really good. The musical score and soundtrack is very tone-setting. Any issue with the film is really due to the limited budget. The ADR is really bad. The editing is come and go. The acting and direction is about what you would expect from a movie like this. Overall though, I'm glad I checked it out! Gotta keep in mind that this was a crowd-funded movie, not a major motion picture. Sit back, pop some popcorn, and enjoy yourself.

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.

A hopeful couple try to figure out their mutual sex problem by retracing her repressed past on a visit to her rural hometown.

Good concept, nice actress, story a bit cliché - but terrible direction/editing/writing. I assumed the latter three were down to the lead actor, and was willing to give him credit for having the dumb determination to put this mess together, but IMDb says several people were responsible.

Low budget, so allowances are made. But the major problem is the director set the actors up for long, static scenes with lots of patchy dialogue - some interesting, the rest unnecessary. Sitting. Standing. Walking slowly. Focus comes and goes. There is an excellent shot early on, with the men back-to-back in the field, which gave me hope. But the story died on screen and, I guess, was already dead on the page.

Music atmospheric, nothing special, and the singing was pleasant enough to outshine everything else.

OK ending, but bad story telling ruined the experience well before that.

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.