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Neverlake (2013)
"Trust the power of the Laaaake!!"
And that's all the explanation you're gonna get about this hodgepodge of a movie. It's a story about a teenage girl going to visit her estranged father or a surprise vacation in the middle of a school year only to get entangled in a organ harvesting fiasco, where she gets to meet a lot of ghosts her age. Because, Lake.
To understand the movie better, these a a few stuff you have to keep in mind:
1. Teenagers are the most trusting and unsuspecting bunch of the lot.
a) Somehow, being raised by her grandma on her mother's side, Jenny knows nothing about her dead mom, which is the most usual thing on earth. Grandma dislikes Dad, Jenny's meeting stepmom for the first time (apparently) and by the look of it she's never even heard about her, she's happy happy about it though (good on her) and she takes dubious handful of "vitamin" pills everyday her Dad prescribed from the moment she arrives. Without asking why. Without asking how he could've known her health situations without even checking her once. Because, Lake (you need strength for hiking). That hiking with Dad never happens but oh well, we'll continue taking the pills. Teenagers are trusting like that.
b) She meets a strange child by the Lake, eyes bandaged up, never gets curious, takes her to a dilapidated building where she meets more of them, comes back to them everyday to read them poems and stories, no adults around ("make sure you're not seen by the adults, they are evil!"), never asks how they live on their own 'cause that's obviously a very normal setting of things.
c) The situation at home gets weird, Dad locks himself in his office for hours or going over to the nearby town overnight, stepmom acting sinister though never forgetting to give her pills, she sees them arguing over some curious hush hush topic through crack of the door, Dad being generally douchy by not taking her anywhere apart from one errand to a shop and she never questions why he called her over in the first place. Vacation, yay, only she's not happy and throws a token tantrum once. still no questions, though.
d) Wakes up in an operating room: lost expression, learns had had an operation for a dubious "sudden adrenaline gland dysfunction": promptly back to her happy self. Doesn't matter that she was a healthy young woman all her life. What operation? What did they do to her? This doesn't look like a hospital! Why is her abdomen paining? Blegh, questions are for dummies. "I'm okay with "Operations" but can we go get an ice cream later?!"
2. Medicine? Works sometimes. Paranormal cures? Well, work sometimes as well. Ta-Daa! We bring you Paramedical Science, guaranteed to work without a glitch through all those nooks in your body medicine and voodoo cannot reach. Got your organs and tendons turning into bones due to over-calcification? We replace the affected organ from a healthy (unwilling) donor but also make sure to carve it out in stone and throw in the middle of the lake. See, we're not sure which one works but if you pull those stone figures out of water, your new organs will turn into stone. Why? Because, Power of the Laaake! Could we have just thrown stone carvings of organs into the lake to cure you then, since that part seems to trump the other? I guess, but that wouldn't make this an interesting movie.
3. When you regain consciousness right before a multiple organ harvest from you and the bad guys are right in the next room with door ajar, don't forget to go back to your room upstairs and pull on a jeans. 'Cause you might need a drink after you've saved your own life and saved the day and pubs look down upon hospital scrub as the dress code.
4. Octopus Medusa Lady living in the lake is a good woman, though she may be blind. Peter needs to tell her what's happening in the lake right under her nose before she comes to your rescue. Good thing she has a hotline to the cops though, they'll arrive right on cue to arrest the stepmom (for what?) while you're still searching inside the dilapidated house after killing your dad and Stepsister.
5. It's heroic to kill your disabled stepsister who was ecstatic on learning she has a sister. Bringing the stone figures out of the lake wouldn't get back your kidney or risk your other organs now that Dad is dead but where's the fun if you don't get to kill anyone innocent?
6. Shelly's poetry makes everything sound polished. Even repeated rants about "sensitive plants" and organs. Promise.
All in all, I have no clue to what I just watched. Hopefully, armed with these hints you will. Good luck!
Lavender (2016)
So many unanswered questions...good that you won't even care.
Starts off with a gory crime scene at a farmhouse, Father, Mother & Sister killed with a young Jane found huddled in a corner with a bloody switchblade. The Uncle is the next of kin, lives nearby and gets called to the scene, however the kid is given up for foster homes(we learn later) and jumpcut to 25 years later when she has a husband and a daughter, with zero recollection of the events. An automobile accident juggles up her loosened screws and she starts remembering bits and pieces of her past life in weird riddle pieces. Sounds promising, right? Well, you'll not be the first to get fooled.
1. Absolutely the first thing you'd notice annoyed is the background score. Pretentious classical music played loud all along, dun-dun-Duns five seconds ahead of when you're supposed to be scared. You can play on your tablet while this movie rolls on your tv, look up when the music pokes up "hey hey look! Somethings about to happppen!" and you can get adequately miffed. Don't worry, you're not missing much.
2. The vapid and annoying Abbie Cornish and her Covet Fashions wardrobe and makeup. Which survive a) a car accident involving four to five roundabouts oft he said car b) irritatingly confusing multiple ghostly figures trying their hands at dumbcharade in the middle of the night attempting to pass off important information about her past c) several near death experiences of her daughter. Her stylists in the movie must be gaining on those Covet levels hard. There are designated impeccable "toppling inside a car look","discovering her traumatic past look", "pretty on the stairs while daughter chokes to death look", "pretty on the bed while ghost sister chokes to death look". Loads of denim. Cool heels. I wanted a few for myself, the runway looks were so good. You almost wait for the label name to popup anytime. Added level bonus: Cornish' "It's Sunday, why did you wake me up at 4 in the morning!' look. Delightful. especially in the scene where her daughter's having an asthma attack and her husband is trying to save her. 5.80 points where she stands by the railing posing.
3. I learned that ghost love painstakingly wrapping cute gifts for the demented. Nice red ribbons, cute little boxes to deliver riddle pieces at her doorstep. That talent could be exploited in Christmas times, just saying.
4. Sooo...we learn the Uncle basically killed off the family with Jane being a witness to the crime as also to the abuse he'd resort to on the kids. He left the house after the mass murder mistakenly thinking Jane to be dead, who was later found by the police shaken and traumatised. However, Uncle makes no attempt at keeping the kid under his roof (he admits to an older Jane that he was not very adept at raising kids) which would minimise the chance that she'd regain her memory and expose his crime to the world. Not a very intelligent man, he.
5. Jane's psychiatrist is a figment of her imagination. Which you guess as soon as the doctor awkwardly loiters around while she opens one of her dubious giftboxes. No doctor has that kind of time for his patients.
6. No context or explanations of any action by the characters. Why pray they moved to that old farmhouse right away? What about their home, did they rent it/sold it/gave it away in case she remembered some hidden treasures buried in the garden of the farmhouse? Does the kid go to school? Anywhere? Is this some extreme case of reverse germophobia where they just move into a dilapidated farmhouse locked up for 25 years and don't even change the bedsheets? Was the Uncle paying its electricity bill for the past 25 years? Good man.
6. That ending, My God. What exactly was the Uncle trying to do running away with the kid under one arm and shooting at the father with another? Leaving behind his house, barn, all those poor cows? Did he plan on the spot to run away on foot with the clothes on his back and the kid tucked under to a goodlife somewhere else while the Mom and Dad sit in their car and talk about the next Milan show? They should've tied his hands backwards.
All in all, a film where all the characters are so vapid and uninterested that you don't feel sympathetic for the protagonists, villain or the ghosts and wish they could somehow have this final epic battle scene where everybody kills everybody off. You could nap in the sofa till then, the music will wake you up. With that final shot of Abbie Cornish lying dead in a Jovani Navy Mermaid Ball Gown($3500) and her dead fish stare. But here, it'll fit.