The Shrine

I'll get this right out of the way - this movie didn't grab me at first. The first act has some problems with dialogue delivery and generally unlikeable characters.. but I gave the film time, and it really started to win me over. Some out-of-place CG fog notwithstanding, this is a very fun effort from the JACK BROOKS MONSTER SLAYER team (though I like Jack Brooks more). Partway through I started to care about everyone more, and by the end the film totally won me over. The last act is a ton of gory fun, feeling like a hybrid of The Exorcist, Rec 2 and The Evil Dead. Great practical make-up work. See this, I fully recommend.

The action of Canadian horror flick "The Shrine" takes place in a small Polish village of Kozki,where several young Americans vanished without a trace.The story of various disappearances is the main interest of Carmen,a young fame and money-hungry journalist.She and her assistant Sara and her photographer boyfriend Marcus travel to Poland to solve the mystery.The locals in Kozki are not friendly and there is an esoteric cult which practices blood sacrifices and has leaders shouting litanies in laughably bad Polish.The portrayal of Polish villagers in "The Shrine" is obnoxious and downright silly,but being Polish I had a total blast watching this crappy horror extravaganza.The story owes a lot to Robin Hardy's "The Wicker Man" and mushroom trip like visions of demonic faces are quite creepy.The soundtrack is minimalistic and there is a bit of great gore.7 angry Poles out of 10.

A couple of American journalists go to a small Eastern European village to investigate the mysterious death of a colleague.

Initially it seems like this might be another "Hostel" torture/gore type flick, but things are not what they appear in the first two-thirds of the movie. The director of Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer helmed this, and he has a good grasp of the genre.

What I liked was the straightforward plot device that is revealed at the conclusion. Pay close attention to what happens around the 32 minute mark because that's the basis for everything that follows.

The movie is fairly low budget, so don't go in looking for fantastic special effects, but they are serviceable. Also, this is not a keep-you-up-at-night type horror movie. It's more so the type that makes you think "What would I have done differently" to avoid what happened to these ppl.

Yes, the script is kinda cheesy. Yes, the actors are blandly pretty. Yes, the characters do annoyingly dumb things in the woods. But there are some pretty decent aspects to "The Shrine" that make it worth the 90-odd minutes out of your life time to watch it.

First of all, it's not as entirely stupid as 99.9999% of horror movies currently in release. Early on there are some sequences which are, though derivative of J-horror, at least nicely scary. There's a very well done mid-movie change up and an ending that actually doesn't make you want to throw up your hands in disgust.

Faint praise, I know. But compared to the brain dead gore porn masquerading as horror films these days, this film's attempt to generate some real scares seems almost revolutionary by comparison. "The Shrine" is, at the very least, a pretty fair port in a storm of Hollywood crap.

An excellent premis for a movie, but the execution was terribly average. The dialogue and acting was sub-par in most cases, but the visual effects and set design balanced that out a little. The movie fell apart in the third act, in which it resembles more of an exorcism movie rather than a horror movie centred around a Polish cult.

A decent one to chuck on with a beer and a couple of bongs. The ritual scenes were particularly fun and interesting to watch.

TLDR: Some scenes were fun, but overall an average movie. 5/10