The story: Emily (Noell Coet) is a blind asthmatic girl who lost her sight after her mother died in a traffic accident. Her father is finally going to start dating again, leaving his blind daughter alone on Mischief Night, a night when teens run around playing pranks on people. Except Emily is visited by a mysterious man in a mask who isn't playing a prank but toying with her while killing everyone who tries to help her.
Was it good?
In parts. The leads actress is charismatic and the movie uses suspense more than gore so there are parts of the movie when we realize the mysterious man is in the house and stalking her that have a definite creepy feel. Unfortunately, it's about 5 minutes out of a 90 minute movie. The rest is hack work and even worse doesn't make any sense. For instance, her boyfriend comes over and she is panicking so he is going to hep get her to safety, but then they go into a room with her mother's stuff and suddenly they are perfectly okay just standing and talking for a while. Yeah, there's a killer running around, her aunt might be dead, but this is a good time to go through a yearbook.
The movie might have been more interesting if it played against conventions. The girl is blind so there's one scene where she walks past a dead body. Wouldn't she be able to smell the body? Or at least wouldn't it be more interesting? What if the attacker was used to hiding in the darkness, but because she is blind she actually can tell he is there even better? Wouldn't that be more interesting?
Even worse, as much as it rips off THE STRANGERS and SCREAM, it doesn't understand what made those movies work. SCREAM takes the idea of a girl unsure if she is ready for sex (trust her boyfriend) and externalizes it in horror movie fashion into her not trusting if he is a killer. THE STRANGERS takes a couple who love each other but are about to break up, then they are attacked and realize they love each other and want to be together. See -- each of those stories took strong emotional stories and used horror to externalize them. That's why you can build thrills and scares, because the audience has keyed into the characters from the real emotional stories. Here there is nothing. She has a boyfriend, and at a point it seemed like they were playing with is he cheating/is he the killer but that gets dropped and becomes nothing. There's the stuff with her sight/blindness but that doesn't have any connection to the killers or Mischief Night.
Derivative. Boring. Not scary. It's not the worse movie out there, but it's not good enough to bother watching.
*** AVOID ****
