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The local prince start looking for wife. All the teenage virgins in the region are invited to a dance, where he will pick his bride. Elvira has been waiting and dreaming about this moment for years, spending her time reading the prince's book about love poetry and daydreaming about him. She actually meets him the woods once and they exchange a quick interested glance.

Her broke widow mother is also all for it as the stunningly gorgeous older stepsister Agnes is out of the running since she fools around with a guy in the barn. And the younger and uglier sister is too young.

While Agnes comes from money, after her father died without money and after getting caught in the barn now is punished and relegated to a maid. Originally Elvira was made fun off for being ugly even though she's alright. But now she's got to get in shape and the mother Elvira, who is very popular with men, spares no effort or resource to help Elvira. Elvira's braces have to come off, she has to get a primitive nose-job and some other gruesome beauty procedures, and has to learn how to dance. The mother bribes the dance school women so they'll give Elvira the main role during what will be a demo dance for the prince. She also spends a fortune on a fancy dress for the occasion. Elvira initially of low self-esteem who saw no chance for herself grows more confident in time and agrees to eat a tapeworm egg to lose weight, which will cost her dearly later.

During the big day, the prince recognizes Elvira and picks her as his dance partner and presumably bride. During the dance though, Agnes, shows up in a veil and for some reason captivates the prince who drops Elvira and goes after her. Agnes flees dropping a shoe. The prince announces he will marry whomever has the other shoe. Elvira gets ahold of the other shoe from Agnes, but the problem is that she has larger feet. So that problem will have to be solved...

The Ugly Stepsister is something different, original, and pretty entertaining. It's good to see women writer/directors get chance to do horror as they are not afraid to show nudity and sex, as opposed to their male counterparts. But what their work lacks is some edge. This movie and The Substance for instance are mild in tone and atmosphere. No fear or dread is created.

I'll admit, given the current trend of movies these days of going pretty slow and then ending strong, I was expecting somehow all hell to break lose at the end, but it never happened unfortunately. What are supposed to be the highlights aren't really that big of a deal. Nevertheless this movie works, it tells a story and tells it well. I liked the theme of ambition gone wrong especially with Elvira's mom and it's Elvira who suffers, especially once she feels threatened by the competition that Agnes represents, and takes that competitiveness too far. But it's the beautiful Thea Næss (Loch Ness? Seriously?) who steals the show as Agnes.

In the 70's apparently kids do nothing but beat each other bloody when they are not being beaten by their parents. In this setting we meet some school kids who start disappearing one by one. Until the protagonist is kidnapped by a guy in a black van carrying black balloons and wearing some silly masks.

The kid is thrown in a basement with a mattress and a black phone. The bad guy watches the kid and converses with him. No point or purpose for the kidnappings is given.

Then the disconnected phone starts ringing and various kids start giving the kid advice on how to deal with the bad guy. The kid figures out these were his previous victims who don't know who they are anymore. The police is a no show for most of the movie. His sister has dreams which sometimes turn out to explain things in reality and she's trying to have dreams that will tell her something about her brother's whereabouts. And she does succeed but by that time the kid and his otherworldly advisors have devised a plan themselves.

Most of the movie takes place in this dark ugly basement with the kid talking on the phone. The bad guy is about as uninteresting as it gets. An odd choice that a villain has nothing to offer. The kid isn't exactly charismatic or interesting either, so you don't have any reason to care about where this movie is going. Not to mention it lasts an exceedingly long 1:45 hours. Not sure what those weird all-in-caps reviews are talking about when they claim this movie is the greatest horror movie ever and the acting/casting/Hawke are all fantastic. Nothing in this movie stands out aside from Madeline McGraw who gets only a few minutes of screen-time.

The motorcade of the VP is attacked in LA by a very professional crew, there are explosions, shootouts. Several secret service personnel die. The survivor, Choi, is entrusted with the nuclear football. Apparently the VP was in LA to receive some recently developed device, the purpose of which only becomes clear later.

Choi calls the higher ups and is told to go to a safe house nearby. The guy and gal with the new device also make it there, the guy is injured. Some big shots from the DOD (DOW?) and one from Homeland Security also end up there.

The DOD guy calls rank while Choi calls his contact, some military guy for some reason, who tells him to not share with anyone that he has the nuclear football. So everyone starts getting suspicious of each other because Choi and the other two can't disclose what they have and the others don't act particularly trust-worthily either.

Suddenly bad guy blow up the windows and repel into the safe house which is more of a safe apartment. When a bad gets mortally shot, he also explodes. One of them survives because the explosive device was damaged.

They interrogate him and find out he's Russian. Our group doesn't agree how far to take the interrogation. The "housekeeper" intervenes before the Russian is killed that increases everyone else's suspicion of him.

Next, more bad guys blow a whole trough the wall. And things start to unravel. Now everyone comes clean about the devices they have, which are actually related. The new device was meant to link the VP's iris to the nuclear football. They also learn they are basically trapped there with no way out as exits are booby-trapped. Now we also learn who the mole is and what the agenda of the bad guys is.

Safe House is an entertaining action movie. You do get caught up in the suspicion and paranoia. Fortunately enough action takes place while they are holed up in the apartment. So it's not just drama that takes place between them, although there is some of that. I wish the initial action scene would have been longer. What was unique and surprising was the bad guys' motives which voices some pretty anti-establishment views and is very refreshing to see in a movie.