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Reviews
The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
That took a turn...
This film starts off with great promise, with a suspenseful premise. A street photographer looking to breakthrough in the art world is looking for an edgy portfolio that really captures the city's underbelly. A gallery owner is underwhelmed by his portfolio and encourages him to stick with a scene a little longer to capture subjects' emotions.
So when the photographer happens upon a small gang of thugs assaulting a woman, the photographer takes a few shots before making his presence known and scattering the clan.
The woman thanks him and gets on a train, whereupon she is bludgeoned to death by a serial killer.
The photographer just so happened to take a photo of the woman getting on the train, with a man holding the door open for her. The man's ring eventually helps the photographer connect him to disappearances.
The first sign of trouble with this film is the unnecessarily graphic gore early on. But OK, whatever.
The photographer senses he's onto something with the woman's disappearance and he goes to the police with his photos. OK.
But he starts to go off the deep end, following the mysterious man who kept the door open for the first victim shown. His girlfriend tells him to stop.
OK. It's pretty standard fare at this point, with the suspense being how is the photographer going to expose the mystery man as a serial killer and be taken seriously by the police?
And then the train's wheels start to come off the track. For me, it's when the girlfriend and a mutual friend go to the serial killer's hotel in search of a key piece of evidence. It's totally out of character for the girlfriend.
The film quickly starts to fall apart from here and crosses over the threshold of the suspension of disbelief until it crashes into what can only be described as a ridiculous halt.
That the film is based on a Clive Barker short story provides no reprieve for its absurd, nonsensical ending that is never really foreshadowed.
The Woman in Black (2012)
Too long
This film could have easily shaved 15 minutes off its run time and you wouldn't have missed anything. There are far too many horror cliches of the main character sensing something around the corner or behind him. The same goes for the music stingers that in many cases could have been dispatched and made the mood of a scene even creepier.
The concept sounds good, but the execution, unfortunately, results in a bore.
Daniel Radcliffe's performance is fine, as are the performances of the supporting cast. The sets and the color grading complement the story. But it's the execution of the story that drags this film down.
The Ritual (2017)
Skip it
If you have to rely on just about every gimmick in the book to tell the the viewer to be afraid, you've probably made a bad movie. And that's what this is -- a bad movie.
Overbearing music cues, slow tracking shots that move in, constant bitching amongst the characters, and ever present shots of the characters staring at things behind the camera with their eyes growing wide, and the ol' "Guys, look at this" line that repeats itself every few minutes are cliches. And that's all this film has. It's as though a bunch of college students made this.
Real horror comes from within the viewer, with the script tapping into the viewer's fears. This film simply relies on the viewer's experience with horror films and hits the viewer over the head with utterly annoying music. It's nothing but one contrived shot after another. It's one of a rare breed that makes 94 minutes feel like an eternity beginning at about the 60-minute mark. Your time would be better spent on something else.
The Building (2009)
Exposition destroys it
When the characters have to spend the last 10 minutes of the film explaining what the audience didn't see that supposedly made everything that it did see make sense, you have a problem.
In short, the more the villain talked at the end, the lower the film's rating got. And the more the heroine talked in the last scene, the worse it got.
That's quite rare for a film.