Another dead baby horror movie. I wonder if there really has been a spate of them recently (include THE DOOR, BIRTHWOOD and a couple others). This movie stars Gale Harold (Queer as Folk, Hellcats), Leisha Hailey (L Word) and Chelcie Ross. Written by Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch. Dicrected by Adam Gierasch (Night of the Demons rmake).
The story: a happy couple expecting their first baby. Then the girl loses the baby. They move so they can start fresh. Then, miraculously the woman gets pregnant again. However she begins seeing strange visions and then people start dying and she becomes worried that her husband is going to kill her like a previous husband in the house killed his wife.
Was it good?
No. It wasn't horrible, but it also wasn't good. The beginning with the couple losing a baby, then starting over and having the woman find out she is pregnant again was good. The rest...well, the big problem is it doesn't make sense. It's all mystery, but even the mystery didn't make sense. Apparently this is a family house (passed down through the family house) and yet no one in the family knows anything about the incredibly large number of people who have died and/or been killed there. Seriously???? Now it's difficult to talk about the problems because everything is played for mystery -- she sees strange visions, her husband starts acting strangely, a couple people die weirdly...and there's no real explanation for it. We get there is something wrong with the house (haunted?) but because it is manifesting in so many different ways that instead of building tension it all just cancels out. Weird stuff + weird stuff + weird stuff = bored.
Again, the problem is that everything is played for mystery so for the vast majority of the film (all but the final 15 minutes) you never know what is going on. So first problem -- you have an incredibly passive protagonist. This takes away one of the basic things people watch movies for -- to see the protagonist achieve a goal. Compare this movie to THE RING or THE GRUDGE where the main characters realize bad stuff is going on and then work to find the root of all of it and free themselves from the curse. This movie lacks all of that. (In fact, I don't think there is an underlying cause of the haunting ever given, simply that it has been happening over and over.)
Second, while you might think having lots of different weird things going on would add to the mystery, it actually works against the mystery. Movies work by building tension, but to do that the audience needs to be able to anticipate what is going to happen and to do that the audience needs to have information. The most basic way is to give the audience more information than the characters have (called dramatic irony). The example Hitchcock used was two people talking in a diner while the audience knows there is a bomb under their seats. By depriving the audience of information, and then having lots of different things going on, it makes it impossible for the audience to anticipate and so the movie is gutted of tension.
It's a shame because with just a few changes to the structure of the screenplay, making the protagonist active and giving the audience a clearer understanding to increase the dramatic tension, this could have been a nice little movie.
But as it stands, it just doesn't work enough.
*** AVOID ****
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