Artik

The good: it's grain and well-shot. Congrats for hiring a real DP and film crew with actual knowledge of camera placement, movement and lighting. Most of the cast is good. The music is rocking, and adds to the overall good atmosphere. The makeup is quite professional. The horror is adequately tense.

The bad: the guy playing the baddie is bad at acting. And his dialogue is so idiotic. It would have been much better if he was mute. And the overall film is just kinda there.

With a nice poster from the awesome artist Christopher Shy & a confusing but decent trailer "Artik" landed on my watchlist and, well, managed to disappoint me more than to impress.

"Artik" seems to have all the right ingredients for an awesome ride of horror including well done visuals (nicely done practical gore, actually great cinematography and lightining, kind of grindhouse-ish look etc.), a pretty typical but cool and fitting original score (not so great overall sound editing though), a great looking, murderous villain, rural setting and whatnot. Sounds good, but there were many faults regarding the acting, the story and the point of it all. First of all, the performance behind the character of Artik himself was... shabby. I'm not sure if it's bad acting all around or just an inability to act with voice, but something was off there. The rest of the performances were alright, with Chase Williamson on top. The biggest issue is the story - the synopsis here on IMDb sounds more interesting than it actually is. People have been praising "Artik" saying that "if you like comic book movies, you'll like Artik". I disagree, the comic book shtick plays a very small role in the plot, amounting to only visual references, without having much impact on the overall idea of this flick. Could've been anything else instead of comic books. Also, most of the characters are pretty underdeveloped and don't get a proper closure, because the last 15 minutes are a tiring edit of small scale action scenes. And then it ends. I have to say that the 69 minute runtime (without the end titles) plays in favor of "Artik", in favor for the viewers.

I don't regret watching "Artik" and I liked it just enough, but I can't call this a good movie - it's almost good. One side of the coin is shiny enough, but the other oh so rusty. My rating: 4/10.

Hmmmm. This movie is hard on me because it has everything I love in an indie horror film but I can also see why some wouldn't care for it. From the violence to the setting to the music to the actors. I love it all. This is the unique flavor of true indie horror/thriller. With that being said, there are a few flaws but so does almost every indie horror film. This movie has a great storyline going for it with a nice "coming of age" feel but the director seemed to have trouble presenting things clearly and in an orderly fashion. Most of the movie is like this and 25 minutes in I still wasn't able to fall under the film's spell. However, by the third act I was fully invested in the film. I really like Chase Williamson and it was great to see him in the role of a "real cool" good guy. The trailer teases by implying max violence when really the violence is A-typical and almost all of it is shown off screen. Still, for me, it was satisfying enough. I love the casting. Jerry G. Angelo shines as Artik and Chase Williamson is also very good as Holton. It's a tense good vs evil story and the showdown is exhilarating to watch. Another thing this movie does well is keep the viewer on their toes with a loud and impending score that punches ur eardrum with sounds of tension and terror. The actual film stands firm at a 69 minute run time but that's a perfect runtime for this film as it's punchy and to the point..nice work Tom Botchii. 7/10

I read some reviews before watching Artik so I had my hopes up for a good serial killer horror movie but in the end it wasn't that special at all. It all looks like it's been done before, no element of surprise here. The sound gave it a good creepy atmosphere, gave it some suspense, and suspense it needed because the story itself wasn't that great. Overall the acting was okay, not great but not bad either. I'm kind of done with brutal torturing scenes, it was creepy when it was new, now it's all been done before, and better.

The trailer really did its job well, made me eager to see the film. It looked like a dark, gritty and violent revenge type film. But it's just the run of the mill hick farmer killer who uses his kids as slaves and a nosey straight edge man who decides he'll be a hero and save the kid. And that really is all there is to it. Nothing more. Shame as the film in the trailer looked great. The film is kinda tame really with hardly any gore to speak of and forget character development. It's not bad acting etc but just didn't go anywhere at all. Disappointing.