dannorder

I wasn't really expecting much, but this film did a good job. The topic, like most scary movies, has been done to death already. All Exorcism movies basically rip off--- I mean, "are inspired by" the Exorcist. They don't seem to venture into real world claims about the topic much, they just take what they know from watching other films. It's a missed opportunity, but it is what it is. Here it is handled pretty well. Three woman are living together, two are set up as close friends, and two are set up us rivals. The main character is a virgin, which means the demon just hanging around (it must have gotten bored waiting 50 years) wants to possess her most. Which I don't really get as far as real world logic, but, again, the trope is true to film logic. They handle it well. Her anguish makes it seem more likely at first that it is just mental illness, and it works when you think about the implications of losing your mind like that. When she goes full on demonic it's a dramatic contrast to her normal innocent behavior. All the men in the film are set up as losers, but it's not about the men. The film also has that weird logic about nudity that is prevalent where one scene seems to have skin very briefly for no reason and others, based upon what's transpiring in the film, would make a lot more sense to show nudity but are framed meticulously so that they don't. There are a couple of scenes later that aren't prolonged but aren't unrealistically short either. Overall, it's still kind of mild, at least for these kind of movies. Sill, if you like demonic possession films, this is slightly better than average. If you still have the itch after watching the classics, it makes a decent diversion.

This film professes to be the Grimm Fairy Tales version of Little Red Riding Hood but doesn't even follow that basic plot. It really seems to be two different bottom of the barrel TV movies stitched together with no rhyme or reason. The plot seems to be that a medieval Little Red Riding Hood is going through the forest when an undead knight warns her of evil. A little later someone in werewolf makeup chases after her, so she runs away... to the castle of said evil, of course. She goes right in and then from then on does nothing of any interest. We never even see the big bad wolf again. That's the first 15 minutes. The ultimate bad guy stands around a lot in meaningless poses we assume the director either thought was dramatic or to excessively pad out the running length of the film. Oh, and everyone does a lot of slow walking that the camera documents in great detail. Anyway, then we cut to modern days (with no explanation) with an influencer (played by Nicole Stark, who is about the closest thing to a redeeming value this film has) in the wild somewhere on a photography trip deep in the mountains before college starts up. The nature is shot through a filter that sucks all the color and grandeur out of it, so even that appears lifeless and nearly monochrome. Then her car (Wait, car? She said she was deep in the wild?) is destroyed by a... I don't know, mummy lady with explosive glass balls? It's never explained what she's supposed to be. So the woman finds a chateau or something, which happens to be... the summer home of the same ultimate evil? I can't even explain who or what this guy's supposed to be, just a guy in a latex mask who apes doing Shakespeare and sometimes has SFX smoke come out of his body. And there's a lot of shots in this film of one bad guy or another in latex mask creeping around comically behind a female character while she's unaware, as if that's threatening, but then walking away for no reason. And, seriously, a whole lot of time transpires, and absolutely nothing of any consequence happens. At some point there seems to be something supposedly happening, but it doesn't advance the plot in any way. And then, back in the middle ages, some other hero shows up and meets a beautiful woman, and, what? Nothing. Then he meets Little Red at the castle of ultimate doom, and the movie just ends shortly later. I'm not marking this as a spoiler because there's absolutely nothing to spoil. I can't reveal a plot point if it doesn't have one. I've reviewed some of this director's movies before, and they were, unsurprisingly, atrocious, but this film is even worse than they were somehow. If you have seen some of my other reviews, you can see I usually bend over backwards to give out stars. Usually if something has some good parts, but admittedly not many, it'll still get a 4. If it's just bad across the board, I'll throw out a 2 just for the effort of making a movie. This gets a one. Not even sorry for that at all. If only I could give it zero.

One of my general rules is that I don't rate something only one star out of ten unless it's so disjointed that it doesn't even deserve to be called a movie. And, unfortunately, I think that applies here. The writing is bad. The cinematography is horrible. The special effects are dismal, like just about everything else. I even normally like bad movies, but just not this kind of bad. Even slideshows are broken down into an outline that tries to make some sense, but this doesn't bother with that. You get random drug scenes and lens flares and the thinnest of ridiculous plots. It's such a shame, because both Karin Brauns (Blair) and Nicole Stark (Kitty -- who is arguably the second most important character but is not even named on the main cast list because they chose to go alphabetically instead of by order of importance) should have had solid modeling careers if nothing else (and maybe they did, I don't know). I'm not dissing them as actresses, because a lot of that depends on the director, Rene Perez, and they clearly got no usable instructions from him. For how bad everything is, you'd think that it was his first movie but, no, he has a long list of equally bad films to his name, before and after this monstrosity. His page on IMDB even says he does the music, which, of course, explains why that also was no good. He strikes me as one of those people that's so incompetent he has no clue just how bad he is and refuses to listen to anyone else. His films are worth looking up just so you know to avoid them at all costs.