Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Scary Movie Month, Day 16

The Black Waters Of Echo's Pond

A group of people play an ancient board game that makes them reveal their innermost secrets (don't ask) and that causes them to start murdering each other (for reals, don't ask). Also there's a weird goat-creature that keeps appearing (what part of "don't ask" are you having trouble with?) for no discernible reason.

My buddy Fabian describes it as "Jumanji, but horror" and he's not wrong except that Jumanji was easily 100x more tolerable than this shitpile (and I didn't like Jumanji). Danielle Harris and Robert Patrick do their best to elevate the material, but many of the performances surrounding them are so bad that there's simply no salvaging them (I'm looking at you, Avellan twins).

Not only are the aforementioned performances distractingly bad, the movie itself is so amateurishly shot that it borders on laughable. Everyone is in close-up almost all the time, and as the characters are wafer-thin to begin with it becomes nigh impossible to discern who's with who, who's talking about who (whom? I never remember the rules for that. I should look it up, it's probably more entertaining than this movie), etc. The only bright spot in that is the fact that by about 20 minutes in I just didn't care anymore.

I would wonder how they knew how to play the ancient board game, but wondering that only causes me to keep thinking about this movie and why should I put more thought into it than the people who made it? I like the concept of "Jumanji, but horror" and I think there could really be something there. This ain't it, though.

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