Audience Member
Incredibly dull and pointless. 2/10
A group of friends head out for a holiday in the country. There they are kidnapped by a weird, psychopathic family.
This was never going to be Citizen Kane. However, it had potential as an entertaining B-grade thriller. Unfortunately, even with such low expectations, it is still very poor.
For a lightweight thriller it moves very slowly and is far from thrilling. There's no engagement - you don't really care about the main characters. Dumb, dull plot that seems to go around in circles.
Avoid.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/20/23
Full Review
jesse o
I haven't been feeling all that great lately the last few days (starting the day of my review for A Perfect Day), emotionally speaking at least, so I've sort of lost the motivation to write out this review. There's nothing that's really hapoened, yet, but I just feel down. Maybe it's those issues that have forced me to put this off until a few hours before I watch tonight's movie, which is what I almost always do anyway, but it's mostly because I'm doing other stuff and I only have the time to do it just before I watch that night's film. Hell, this review is being started earlier than most if I'm honest. But there's something that held me back from writing it sooner, since I've done nothing all day. I don't know what that something is. Perhaps apathy, who knows??? And apathy is a feeling that I guess I would describe upon watching this movie. I've gotta be honest, I don't think I've watched as many Chilean movies as I probably should. I've seen a few of them and, for the most part, they've been enjoyable. All of them, actually, have been horror movies now that I think about it. Maybe I've seen non-horror Chilean movies that just aren't jumping out at me, who knows? But, I digress, I'd have to say that this is the first Chilean movie I've seen that, let's just say, falls below standards. A group of friends go on a trip to the country, or wherever the fuck they were actually going, before their car breaks down, is fixed by a stranger and then they make their way down a road, where they find a woman covered in wounds. Once they get out of the car, they are attacked by these two...brothers, I guess and taking to this rundown house/mansion where they are kept as hostages by this insane family. It's definitely got a Texas Chainsaw Massacre type feel to it, minus the chainsaw-toting maniac that wears a mask made of the skin of his victims. But, obviously, this isn't at the level of quality of the original Chainsaw Massacre, it's more along the lines of the sequels. As you would expect, the movie then becomes the characters' attempts to escape and, hopefully, avenge what this family have done to them. For one reason or another, they are being kept hostage for a reason and the matriarch of the family, if she can be called that, mentions something about delivering them to some sort of power. What this power is and what exactly this power wants with them is unknown to me. Maybe she means that they'll kill those that are useless to them and keep the ones who might help to serve their needs. The movie doesn't make this clear, to be perfectly honest, so I have no clue as to what they were talking about. But this is just what about you would expect. It turns into every survival-horror film out there, where it's just about trying to get out of this situation and, hopefully, finding someone who'll help them against this...family. It's not really particularly interesting or enthralling. It's not as frustrating an experience as Drifter, the last movie I reviewed, in that at least Drifter had SOME potential, even if it turned right when it should have turned left 9 out of 10 times, which ended up making it a bad experience to sit through. This never really had the potential to be anything special, it just didn't have the budget for that, so it's less frustrating to watch, but that doesn't make this any better. The acting is fine, I guess. The best of them would have had to be the lady who played the matriarch of the family, whose name I don't even know, the character OR the actress. She just seemed to have the most experience out of everyone else here (minus the old guy who appears near the end) and she ended up being pretty good, all things considered. There's plenty of blood, gore and violence though it's not like it really looks great. There's sometimes when someone is having their head smashed in with a rock, or being decapitated by a machete, and it just looks kinda fake. I mean, OBVIOUSLY, it's gonna be fake, but they don't even attempt to hide the fact that some of these are clearly dummies set up. Like, for example, when Ana kills Pedro, by crushing his skull with the rock I just mentioned, they do quick cuts. They jump back and forth between Ana bringing the rock down and it crushing Pedro's head. You never get to see Pedro's head for more than a second at a time, but that second is more than enough to show you how phony it all looks. I will say, however, that the flick does make what the group went through like an absolutely horrifying ordeal and that's not something a lot of these types of movies succeed at, even good ones. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher, even though I don't think it was meant to be. Ana escapes after ***SPOILER*** all her friends died and she gets into this car, hysteric and telling the lady who's driving to take them away. The camera is set-up diagonally to the car, from behind, and all of a sudden you hear a gunshot and blood splatter out of the driver's side window. I suppose the idea is meant to be that Ana is gonna be taken back to the house by another member of the family who, at this point in the film, and keep in mind this movie is seconds away from ending, had never been seen. If that was meant to be the ending, then that's just very cheap, since everyone else had been dispatched of and the old man went back to the mansion, knowing he was defeated. Now that I remember, Ana did leave one of the brothers alive and maybe he could have done it. Still felt cheap regardless and was a little confusing if you really weren't paying attention to what had happened. So, I guess that's about it for this review. While I would say that this was a bad movie, it wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen. Just another bad horror movie in a ocean full of them. The poor cinematography, inconsistent acting and non-existent plot definitely did its number on this. I wouldn't recommend it, even if you lose a bet. There's very little, if anything, to enjoy here.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Stupidity reigns supreme in this piece-o-sheet flick. When will it end?!? I ask because this movie didn't seem to have one. Such potential and then.....much disappointment...:(
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Väkivaltainen ja häiriintynyt leffa.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
Full Review
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