baresimian

Because of all of the praise others in this space have heaped on this movie, I was actually expecting a terrifying horror movie experience. This ain't that!

The movie features a bunch of gruesome deaths and a lot of gratuitous gore. It's rarely actually scary. It's often uneven and silly with things happening that just make no sense. For example, there's a group of tough mean girls in elementary school (why and where did they get a crate of bananas??). There's this "dude" 20-something's preacher who's kind of a stoner and doesn't seem to know anything about preaching? Why is a real estate agent showing him around the house he grew up in?

A lot of these incongruities are there to set up another unnecessarily gory death or deliver dialogue that desperately wants to be "edgy", but is really just amateurish. I kept feeling that this was a movie geared toward the 19-year old boy crowd with the gut, gore and silly dialogue. If that doesn't appeal to you, just wait for this one to make it to streaming.

This is actually a well-crafted movie. It's not particularly scary, but it has great settings, cinematography and scoring that really draws you in and allows you to feel the dread and foreboding of all of the characters. The acting is top-notch and I would love to see these actors in other roles. The character of the mother was a bit too long-suffering for me and that was kind of annoying. Interesting twist at the end, but sometimes I lost interest in the scenes that were meant to be scary, but felt just a little too drawn out for my liking. Give it watch on a rainy evening if you want to see an interesting movie, but don't want to get too invested.

So I guess it's called the wailing because there's a lot of that in this movie. But I challenge anyone to tell me what the hell actually happened!

It has a very promising start, with bizarre murders and possession. But then it starts taking all of these "twists" that don't really make a lot of sense and don't tie up at the end.

Acting and cinematography was great, but the pacing was a challenge with SO many scenes of people fighting, running, screaming and bleeding that it just gets kind of tiresome and annoying. It would definitely have benefited from some serious editing as it feels a little repetitive at times.

This is not really a scary movie, although there's a fair amount of gore and, true to its genre, the characters seem to repeatedly make bad decisions. Not sure why all of the extraordinary reviews are here. You can skip this one.