The Hatred

I watch a minimum of 100-115 movies each month, easy. That's over 1200 per year. Seeing that many movies has taught me to appreciate the wide variety of styles and artistic expression that make up the many movies released year after year. The world's oldest profession is the Shaman, the Witch Doctor, the Healthcare worker. The world's second oldest profession is storytelling.

15 year old Zelda Adams in the lead role of this little known gem recites her lines as if she were reading poetry, beautiful poetry. Her eloquent cadence, rhythm, and tone gave the movie a haunting quality usually polished and performed by actors several years her senior. Her delivery reminded me of the more reflective stories seen in movies like 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs' for example, and was a treat to experience. I wonder if the people who trash the hard work that goes into making movies intended to deliver a message or cause the viewer to think can explain exactly what the Director of Photography does or the purpose of an Art Director and why a Movie Director will take in the added expense of hiring them. I can't imagine someone more knowledgeable about the technical side of movie making would give this move a 1, a 2, or a 3. The cinematography and art direction of 'Hatred' is vivid and relevant throughout the movie and for me a noticeable treat. I can't say enough about this movie. I enjoyed it thoroughly. My lone gripe about the movie is that I that I wished it were longer than 59 minutes. I would have liked to have seen another 20 minutes and could have easily settled in on an additional 40. It was written and delivered that well. Perhaps the not so obvious beauty of this story is its simplicity and focus on the main characters to be able to say and relate so much in a so short a period of time. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes a good movie beyond the usual Hollywood extravaganzas of X-Men and Marvel Studios, and challenge anyone who takes the time to watch 'Hatred' to imagine they're sitting around a camp fire in Ice Age Europe, or the Serengeti a few thousand years ago, after supper, and listening a tribal elder tell a similar unusual and scary story.

Saw this on Amazon and from the opening scene, I was hooked. I don't know how much this film cost, but it looks like a studio film, but feels like an artistic expression in the most honest of ways. The lead actress I found out was only 13 when this was filmed. Zelda Adams has the acting chops and it was a pleasure to watch her command the lead. I felt her hatred. I am looking forward to seeing more films by these filmmakers.

I started this and was pretty much immediately put off. Heavy metal soundtrack over civil war soldiers, flat line delivery to cover up lack of acting skills... too many jarring anachronisms. If you're going to insist on putting your story in a different era, do some freaking research and have the money to spend on selling it to the audience. Otherwise, just change it to be modern day.

There wasn't much to this, it wasn't clever or scary or shocking or surprising... just a long slog to the end. Oh well.

Chose to watch this because of the IMDB rating. Big mistake. One of the most boring films I've ever seen. Pretentious dialogue and laughable special effects. I wished I'd had that bag with the crosses for eyes to wear while I fast forwarded through this tripe.

I'll say this for the boring, tedious and completely flat and uninteresting mini-feature (clocking in at barely an hour) The Hatred: it has some nice photography and even a couple of interesting camera compositions. Does that make it worth sitting through? Absolutely not! You have the simplest of revenge plots, a nice little twist when a dead man is resurrected to assist, all the potential in the world and yet it is rendered dull and uninteresting by the writer's complete inability to flesh out the story in any way. Couple that with direction so desperate to be "ARTISTIC!!!!" that it manages to make stalking, killing and haunting, boring, boring and boring and your failure is assured. Everything other than the photography and a few camera angles seems deliberately done to frustrate the viewer and sabotage the film. There's nothing like showing us a bunch of men standing around and then having the voice over of a young girl - who was not there - tell us what they're thinking. Hey, isn't that what dialogue is for? Or how about never showing the incidents we might get involved in so that you can waste our time showing people just walking in the snow?

And I cannot stress this enough - there is a special place in Hades reserved for the near-ceaseless narration as it drones on with all the depth and literary quality of a computer program randomly slamming words into a sentence. It actually makes pretentious, gibberish sound good in comparison. I wish I was joking but I'm not. What she says LITERALLY makes no sense and/or contradicts itself. It is the worst sort of nonsense pretending to be profound. And the young actress speaking the nonsense may make an interesting visual - staring off into space with her dark oversized hat - but the rest of her performance, and certainly her insipid line-readings, are equally still and emotionless. Her hat has a lot more charisma and screen presence and could probably handle the narration better also. For that matter, the hat could have written a better screenplay.

Add in the pointless ending (that makes no sense) and I am tempted to believe that this project is simply a bad-joke version of a bad movie; I find it hard to believe that anybody could have spent this much effort on such a ridiculous script unless it was their intention to make something awful. I mean, they had to know...right? They had to.