Satanic

Two young couples heading for a music festival find themselves in a nightmare scenario in Los Angeles after taking a day to check out some of the true crime hot spots in town. While one couple is straight laced and reserved, the other is attracted to Gothic culture and thrill seeking. Peer pressure and bad decisions lead to a nightmare scenario for all four teens. Satanic fits somewhere in between cookie cutter teen horror of the last 20 plus years and a cable television movie of the week. It isn't horrible but probably not worth watching again. If you've ran out of options and don't mind lowering your standards, this one shouldn't have you rolling your eyes too much.

A tour of LA's creepiest places leads to a chance encounter with a strange woman and a dangerous ritual for four visiting students.

The protagonists are unlikeable, and the time wasted developing them just makes them more so, but there's enough that's creepy and disturbing about Satanic to make it an acceptable horror film. Nothing you'll want to see twice, but if you and your friends just want a dumb horror movie, Satanic is better than a lot of things you could settle for.

At times, it feels like a vanity project for Hyland, whose character is the movie's conscience and reason and everything else that's supposedly decent and mature, but as with all vanity projects, it ends up a poor way to showcase her potential. When she wants to be cute, she's cute enough, but when she's scared she comes off as hysterical, and when she's righteous, she comes off as overbearing. It's hard to say how much of this is the fault of the script or direction.

The formula is pretty much standard. You take an up and coming young starlet (Modern Family's Sarah Hyland ) and throw her in a B movie. The film gets a bump in eye balls because of her potential star power and she gets to push away her TV star image and see if she has any pull with a wider audience.

On paper it makes sense, and the quality of the movie is almost unimportant. Well, this time the product is one of the most unforgettable films you may never see, and really all the sadder because the 1st ½ of the film did have promise.

The plot is simple - 4 young college students go to LA for a tour of Satanic sites, and my pet cat can guess how it goes from there. The actors have potential, and although Hyland is the star, Steven Krueger is by far the most interesting character, playing a 'nice' jock. His story could have been much more interesting, and they simply toy with his religious nature before forgetting it ever existed.

The director does a nice job building tension (or is it just boring?), until a very sudden and particularly still conclusion. I can't decide if the sound track and back ground noise are cool or super dumb.

The real fall of this movie is that is brings nothing new or interesting to the genre. There is basically 0 explanation and logic to several of the key parts of the film. Good horror is similar to detective films where the audience gets some joy out of figuring out the meanie, and coming up with a theory of how to protect themselves were they in a similar situation. Think of it as a choose your own adventure where someone else is making the choices, and it is fun to think about how things would differ had a character made the other choice. This film robs us of that, and it is why it ultimately fails.

Hello Sarah Hyland, we see you outside your comfort zone. Acting and tension 'B', directing, plot and enjoyment 'F'.

It seems like one of the hardest things to get out of Hollywood or an indie producer is a decent horror movie. "Satanic" is yet another in a long line of below par, forgettable horror movies made in the past 10 years. But at least it's not another crappy found footage film.

The production values on this movie are pretty good... again, no shaky, hokey found footage documentary-style garbage. Sound editing is pretty solid. The movie poster is ridiculous, but the movie looks and sounds pretty good.

But the story is weak... the story that picks up with Alice in the hotel makes no sense, and there's not much attempt to explain any of it. And these characters are awful. From the start, the four travelers come across as a bunch of self-absorbed, arrogant jerks. Seth the "goth" guy is particularly punchable. David and Elise are okay, but the former is pretty unbearable at the start. The tighten up a bit and get better as the trouble starts hitting them, but by that point I really had lost all interest in them. Some people have mentioned Sarah Hyland as being a star of some sort, but I've never heard of her or seen her show, and in this movie she's just your average "good girl" that you get in a horror movie... ends up being the Scream Queen. But she's not all that impressive... more irritating towards the end than anything else, really.

And the ending... meh.

If you don't expect much from your horror movies and are a very generous sort, it's possible you could give this a 4, I suppose. I was originally going to give this a 1, but that's not fair given the number of staggeringly awful horror films out there (like "American Poltergeist", "Ouija Experiment 2", etc).

As a horror fan, I tend to check out quite a few horror films. If I had a chance to "unview" this one, I would. The plot and writing are very poor. I realize the movie was made for a teenage audience, but still such a waste of time and money. Within the horror genre, good acting is not necessary (although appreciated). The performances here were so over the top and forgettable. The chills and scares were practically absent. You don't get to see much at all. I guess they kept the "shocking" scene for last, but for a more experienced horror viewer it didn't shock at all. It got so boring at some point I had to fast forward to see the finale, out of pure curiosity. Still a disappointment. If you're into the genre, just avoid this one.