R Brown

Jill was so ahead of her time, truly this aged perfectly.

This is a Comfort Movie idgaf!

A film so glaringly unsure of itself unfortunately cannot live up to the high expectations its first act set for it. The First Act of this film is phenomenal, I truly loved the set up and even found thrill in seeing the mystery unfold in the second act but once the lead character (played very well by Camille Sullivan) travels to an abandoned sanctuary, the film really lost me and it never regained my interest the remainder of its runtime. There is a strong sense of terror within the film that is present and well utilized until it isn’t. You truly can feel the passion behind the camera and I think it’s a shame the 3rd act failed the way it did because I was ecstatic at the thought I would walk away from this in awe saying that the online consensus was wrong and that I loved it but it really did lose me with a jarring tone change and its lack of identity. Chris Stuckmann was a YouTube personality I would be a liar to say I did not regularly watch in my teens, from his viral bad BvS rewrite to his controversial “1000 must see films” book. I really enjoyed the man’s content and loved his criticism style and his Hilariocity videos, unfortunately I do not believe he would have rated his own movie very well had it been put in front of him a few years back. This commits to horror tropes I’d seen Chris call out tens of hundreds of times -bad dialogue  - Useless husband in horror. - Tone change that feels like a completely different film come credits. - So committed to recreating good horror we have already seen that it forgets to shine on its own. I would absolutely watch another film Directed by Stuckmann and am thrilled to walk away with the positives that I did, I just hope in his next film we will get to see him with a story/ script/ direction more sure of itself rather than sure of it’s inspirations. This film wears its inspirations on its sleeve (Hereditary, Rosemary’s Baby, The Blair Witch Project, Etc.) and unfortunately as it did not stick the landing it was just an imitation that uses elements from the aforementioned films without fleshing them out to fit in its own. The “Shadow Man” imaginary Friend story did not work for me and outside of creepy imagery in various scenes just felt like a Best of: Rosemary’s Baby. For a sophomore release I strongly believe Chris just needs to let someone else write the script. You can certainly feel the “tell that to Zodd’s Snapped Neck” fingerprints all over this script.

Painfully bland and visually unpleasant, lacking all development necessary to achieve a murder mystery leading to one of the worst and most badly handled “fucking OBVIOUSLY!” reveals I have ever seen. This truly feels like a fake horror movie made to be played on the screen in a real horror movie because they didn’t wanna pay for the rights to anything real that mattered. I don’t know what possessed me to rewatch this tonight but I’m not mad I did. on all real levels this is an atrocity, it was atleast thrilling to go through how utterly ridiculous and stupid this film is again. I personally was never engaged although I do have a respect for the overwhelmingly cheesy nature of watching this film 2D. When I inevitably revisit this next year I plan to give it a shot in 3D.