lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin: USA

Rat­ings:
Kim: 1 out of 5
Justin: 2 out of 5

Notes:

This movie was dread­fully bor­ing, it wasn’t the worst film we’ve seen this month, but it comes really close. Creep was mean­der­ing and unen­gag­ing but it had momen­tum. This flick was pretty slow except for a hand­ful of sequences and I’d still say it was way less stu­pid than The Last House in The Woods. Wes Craven, for some rea­son, got his name on the box as “pre­sen­ter” but there is no indi­ca­tion that he had any hand in mak­ing the film. I guess since the film was more or less about insom­nia and night ter­rors and because Wes Craven’s name is so strongly asso­ci­ated with Night­mare on Elm Street, the pro­duc­ers fig­ured they get more asses in seats by putting the name of an “expert” on the cover.

Julia has night ter­rors and since she’s been study­ing for her Master’s they have sub­sided, until she comes back into con­tact with an old friend with a sim­i­lar afflic­tion and she starts expe­ri­enc­ing them all over again. This film took 74 min­utes just to get started and then, once it started, it ended, and you didn’t feel like any­thing was accom­plished. I keep say­ing this over and over, but the num­ber one ele­ment for good hor­ror is you have to estab­lish some kind of feel­ings for or against the main char­ac­ter. Sure, the film plays around with the idea of obscur­ing whether or not Julia is going insane, but you still have to like her. I didn’t like her. I didn’t hate her, either, and therein lies the prob­lem. All of Julia’s friends are just as bor­ing as she. Ethan Embry is in this film– pos­si­bly the most like­able happy-go-lucky guy ever– and the film­mak­ers were such jack­asses that they cast him as this rude, ironic, grumpy painter.

The lit­tle night crea­tures are pretty creepy con­sid­er­ing you can barely get a glimpse of them for 80% of the film, but dur­ing the cli­mac­tic scene in a sub­way tun­nel where Julia is attacked by a mob of the things, it appears these crea­tures are noth­ing more than an angry pile of bar­be­cue ribs.

Once I real­ized they were just ribs, this entire film made more sense to me. Julia is trag­i­cally under­weight dur­ing the entire film, and all of her friends are obvi­ously bulimic (one of them going so far as to shoot him­self in the head before tak­ing another bite at a diner). The ribs aren’t try­ing to kill Julia, they just want her to eat them, but in her hys­ter­i­cal state of mal­nour­ish­ment she runs away from them.