paulsgondea

I never give out one star reviews. Even in the worst movies there is usually something to salvage. In the "Banshee Chapter" there just isn't. It's a unbelievable mess from absolute start to finish. I very badly wanted to turn it off at almost all aspects of the movie but I kept going because I had decided prior hand that I wanted to write a review for it.

Like, I said, usually there is a modicum of anything to salvage even from the worst movies, and I'm a pretty optimistic film watcher in that respect. Banshee Chapter not only is completely garbage, it makes a mockery of the film watcher. I'm beginning to think these 7 and above star ratings are paid shills because there is no way anyone with any self respect would actually... like this?

Let's start with the Utterly tripe and BORING plot. Sure, it seems interesting upon reading about it, exploring the drug experiments the CIA did in the 60s and adding a "Lovecraftian" flair to it. The reality is the film toys with anyone even slightly educated on those topics, even to the point that I thought for a fleeting moment the film was satire. It is not. It just is that badly made. It takes those two narratives and treats them as if a High school film student who just learned of them would. Less even, because that student might have at least some respect for the concepts. Not only that, it introduces a character so badly cut from Hunter S Thompson that it's not even an influence it's an awful caricature of itself.

The actors involved look like they would rather be anywhere else but acting for this film. I cannot remember the last time I saw such a boring and bland lead, and she more then played the part of "give me my promised money and let me go". Half the movie devolves into shouting matches between the lead and the Hunter S. character. The cinematography is laughable, starting off as a found footage/documentary style but then just... abandoning it? halfway through. Somehow the lead found a way to mount her cameras in all different angles throughout the scenes? It wouldn't be a big deal but you can't start as a documentary style and just abandon it without any explanation? Childish.

The ONE positive is there's a few jump scares that actually aren't too bad. The actually scares themselves are a CGI mess, but the tension behind them isn't too bad. My God though if the producers thought 3 decide jump scares and maybe 2 minutes out of the ~90 minute run would be enough to salvage this film, they should have just made a short. Childish again.

Childish, really is what describes this movie the best. What, if ANY, potential there was is smashed like a child running a temper tantrum. The creators of this movie show no respect to movies as an art form. If you told me this was the project of a couple stoned out high schoolers with a massive budget from Dad I that's what I would think it was. Let me reiterate once again, I never give out 1 star reviews and I also don't write such hyperbolic reviews. It's hyperbolic because it needs to be, there is no other way to describe this trashing.

This is a trend that more and more horror movies made in the last few years follow. "Z" is another one to add to that list, with a strong start that loses all sense of direction in the second half.

"Z" has the bones of a strong movie though. The main actress plays her role genuinely, and her acting interplay with the child actor is convincing. Most kids in horror movies nowadays get compared to the child in "Babadook" and this child actor is nothing of that whiny sort. He pulls off some well done solo shots. "Z" also looks great. The director manages to pull out everything he can out of his budget (which was around 400k), and produced a movie with the looks and direction five to ten times of the money that went into it. That in its own sense deserves credit, the movie's looks and sounds fantastic for the budget.

Where "Z" really begins to loose it's mark is in the direction of the plot, especially the second half. The beginning of the movie starts off well, and it's subtlety is jarring. It has jump scares few and far in between, relying more on atmosphere. The jump scares it does show are decently well done. Best of all, the characters actually act sane. They reacting to what happens like real people in real life would do, which is refreshing.

Right around the halfway point it looses its direction completely. It's a different movie, like the director switched out with someone else. "Z" turns into cheap jump scares galore, the characters devolve into morons, and the plot jumps off the path laid out by the first half of the film. This all ends with the last 20 minutes that had me peering out from hands over my eyes, not from the horror but from the cringe of the plot.

"Z" turns into a B level horror movie where gone was any sense of subtly and instead everything is presented to you at face value. Nothing against these type of horror movies, but with the potential the first half of the movie showed, it's hard to not be disappointed with how it ended. Still though, the director is one to keep an eye on. If he can learn from some of his mistakes, he can put out something worth watching all the way through. The first half of the film marks that his potential is there.

Demon is a low budget Polish flick, that primarily takes place in the span of one night. There's nothing really.... wrong with the movie, but I can't justify giving it more then 3 stars when i spent more then half the movie wanting to turn it off.

So what I mean by that. Movie is structurally sound. The plot moves at a snails pace, but it makes sense and moves in a way that makes sense. Direction is fine, cinematography is good, same with the acting. There's nothing really WRONG with the movie looking at it in that objective point of view, and I can get the high reviews it's gotten. It's also a foreign film and moves differently then most american made film does, and i know that gets some extra points in people's eyes.

But. it is. SO boring. I'm not even the type that gets bored by slow moving movies. I usually love slow movies. Demon though, it's slow to a fault. Over the course of this wedding night, and that's the only spoiler i'm going to give, a lot happens but in the end you realize nothing really has happened. Not only that, I felt absolutely no connection to any of the characters, and what was going on with them. It's my belief that slow movies work well because they tend to be more character driven, but Demon ends up eliciting no emotions at all. I want to care about what's happening over the course of this night, but man I just don't care about what happens to any of these characters.

I don't want to give any spoilers, but the central plot in this movie comes and goes with no real resolution, and no real reason why it happened.

Which again, would be fine, if the movie was successful in making you connect with its characters. but because it doesn't, the whole movie starts to unravel and lose its whole purpose. is it a character study? is it a metaphor for race relations between the polish and jewish? I can't even tell the genre of the movie. It's advertised as horror but has neither jump scares nor any slow tension or buildup. At best I would call it a drama but usually dramas... you know... illicit drama.

So in the end, the bones for this movie are all there, but there's a serious lack of purpose, emotion, motive, and direction.