This movie was recommended to me by a family member as "Christian horror," the concept of which, at first, made my eyes cross. After some thought, I realized that there was going to be a lack of anything supernatural in the solution to the puzzle, much like how Scooby and the gang inevitably pulled a mask off the first person they'd met in the course of their actual investigation. Unfortunately, the finished product was revealed to be a bit like gluten-free bread. All the elements were in place, but something wasn't quite right.
Like mainstream horror, the acting is bad enough to border on the criminal. The dialogue is even worse, equal parts run-on sentences and hyper-channeled bits of Clueless. Yeah, that's right. I was totally buggin. Totally. There were many consistency errors that I spotted, where dialogue or action contradicted previous scenes' action or dialogue. I'm still trying to figure out how the elder brother had to wait for his next birthday to get his driver's license, but his sister had hers.
The set up is not terrible and gets a lot of use in the genre: the urban legend spirals out of control until the ghostly corpse of someone gets into a rampage. That was all fun. The characters were remarkably believable and with the exception of the dialogue (and the delivery), resembled normal people in normal situations. Between the details and the rabid aversion to anything that might be considered alternative, like the goth kids and the occult, this was really shy on horror-type conflict and scares. In a lot of ways, this felt like an old Scooby Doo episode. I kept waiting for someone to holler "Jinkeys, Mr. Jenkins!". Don't get me wrong, I dig ole Scoob, but it doesn't scare me or really keep my interest and Hangman had similar issues.
I guess I could quote Clueless myself and refer to this as a “total Monet:” From a distance everything looked okay, but the details were a mess. Some research could have been done on the occult, considering how much of it made the script, so that they'd know that EYRE LEBA (which I think was misspelled) wouldn't appear in a room with people chanting in Latin over a pentagram. It should also be noted that Voodoo and its trappings (five minutes of research taught me that Voodoo dolls don't have anything to do with Voodoo, but it's "N'awlins" cousin Hoodoo) isn't all about raising zombies, satanic practices, and spreading cholera. Both religions would have obvious Christian imagery on their altars because they represent a fusion of Christian and traditional African practices and all I could see were bones.
The filmmakers might have wanted to confirm that (1) cross-order hybrids can actually happen (even if one of the spider species are made up) and (2) those hybrids can breed (mules and ligers are sterile, as are the hybrid sport fish ODNR dumped into my lake last year, so I’m guessing the ability to breed wouldn’t be a norm for hybrid animals), but that wasn't a priority either, apparently. Goth doesn't mean evil, it doesn't equate to belief in or use of witchcraft, and being goth shouldn't let you make the victims of this story the bad guys. There was an obvious bias here, which I'd have had more respect for if I spotted tolerance for people being different in any form.
I guess I could quote Clueless myself and refer to this as a “total Monet:” From a distance everything looked okay, but the details were a mess. Some research could have been done on the occult, considering how much of it made the script, so that they'd know that EYRE LEBA (which I think was misspelled) wouldn't appear in a room with people chanting in Latin over a pentagram. It should also be noted that Voodoo and its trappings (five minutes of research taught me that Voodoo dolls don't have anything to do with Voodoo, but it's "N'awlins" cousin Hoodoo) isn't all about raising zombies, satanic practices, and spreading cholera. Both religions would have obvious Christian imagery on their altars because they represent a fusion of Christian and traditional African practices and all I could see were bones.
The filmmakers might have wanted to confirm that (1) cross-order hybrids can actually happen (even if one of the spider species are made up) and (2) those hybrids can breed (mules and ligers are sterile, as are the hybrid sport fish ODNR dumped into my lake last year, so I’m guessing the ability to breed wouldn’t be a norm for hybrid animals), but that wasn't a priority either, apparently. Goth doesn't mean evil, it doesn't equate to belief in or use of witchcraft, and being goth shouldn't let you make the victims of this story the bad guys. There was an obvious bias here, which I'd have had more respect for if I spotted tolerance for people being different in any form.
I guess this movie’s about lots of things. It’s about ghosts and a family of FBI detectives and hybrids and how high school sucks. Even worse, it’s about 1 hour and 45 minutes long. It wasn’t terrible, but I could have found a better use of my time. Considering the rave reviews for the book, I'm thinking that the adaptation was poorly done, and they guys turned what was probably a decent story for tweens into something less.
