RE: The Last Movie You Watched
January 29, 2019 at 11:30 pm
(This post was last modified: January 29, 2019 at 11:33 pm by Rev. Rye.)
This week in the Deep Hurting Project is The Disappointments Room. What's a disappointments room, you may ask? Well, here's the HGTV clip that inspired it:
Yes, a horror movie based on a segment from an HGTV show. That alone should tell you how scary this film really is.
This film is probably the least scary horror film I've seen since I was still regularly watching MST3K. It's really saying something that the best performances in the film easily come from archival footage of The Magic Garden that the kid is watching in one scene. From the video of the real Disappointments Room, and the fact that it's a haunted house movie, and the fact that about a third of the way through, the kid's telling his mom that he's worried she'll get sick again, well, most everything you expect to happen does happen. Literally the only unexpected plot detail is that they decide to move away from the haunted house in the end. About the only thing that distracts from this is the fact that there is virtually no structure to the film. One scene, Kate Beckinsale's meeting with an old lady who tells her about the disappointments room in the title and about the paranormal activity involved, and the next scene, she's haggling with the handyman about his prices for roof repair while her son gripes about being hungry. I have no idea why one scene follows another in this film. The main plot of the dead girl haunting the home is treated like B-plot at best, taking a back seat to some really mundane family shit.
And for a horror film that relies on the "could it all be in their heads" card, Kate Beckinsale's portrayal feels way too mundane for it to work. In a competently made film, they'd have the protagonist thrust into a weird situation where their actions would seem to be fairly sensible, at least until we step back and they reveal how strange they really are. Like, say, in this film, she'd be concerned about the possibility of the house being haunted by the dead girl and once she sees how much in danger she is, she decides to take drastic action that seems like it could save her family, only for it to be revealed how off-base it really is. In this film, she starts to do some really strange things (like destroying paintings) even though there's no reason for it, and doing it all with very little emotion. And somehow, I doubt that's what they were going for. And then she accepts that she was having a nervous breakdown about a minute after her husband catches her almost going Oh Dae-Su on her son with a hammer.
Also, the effects on the ghosts look like utter shit. The girl's deformity and the judge's bashed-in head look like they were made by Troma, and yet this was a $15 million movie with a lot of talent behind it. And the special makeup effects were designed by a studio that won an Emmy and an Oscar for their work, and is currently working on The Walking Dead. Dafuq?
And now for the obvious joke literally everyone made about the film:
Yes, a horror movie based on a segment from an HGTV show. That alone should tell you how scary this film really is.
This film is probably the least scary horror film I've seen since I was still regularly watching MST3K. It's really saying something that the best performances in the film easily come from archival footage of The Magic Garden that the kid is watching in one scene. From the video of the real Disappointments Room, and the fact that it's a haunted house movie, and the fact that about a third of the way through, the kid's telling his mom that he's worried she'll get sick again, well, most everything you expect to happen does happen. Literally the only unexpected plot detail is that they decide to move away from the haunted house in the end. About the only thing that distracts from this is the fact that there is virtually no structure to the film. One scene, Kate Beckinsale's meeting with an old lady who tells her about the disappointments room in the title and about the paranormal activity involved, and the next scene, she's haggling with the handyman about his prices for roof repair while her son gripes about being hungry. I have no idea why one scene follows another in this film. The main plot of the dead girl haunting the home is treated like B-plot at best, taking a back seat to some really mundane family shit.
And for a horror film that relies on the "could it all be in their heads" card, Kate Beckinsale's portrayal feels way too mundane for it to work. In a competently made film, they'd have the protagonist thrust into a weird situation where their actions would seem to be fairly sensible, at least until we step back and they reveal how strange they really are. Like, say, in this film, she'd be concerned about the possibility of the house being haunted by the dead girl and once she sees how much in danger she is, she decides to take drastic action that seems like it could save her family, only for it to be revealed how off-base it really is. In this film, she starts to do some really strange things (like destroying paintings) even though there's no reason for it, and doing it all with very little emotion. And somehow, I doubt that's what they were going for. And then she accepts that she was having a nervous breakdown about a minute after her husband catches her almost going Oh Dae-Su on her son with a hammer.
Also, the effects on the ghosts look like utter shit. The girl's deformity and the judge's bashed-in head look like they were made by Troma, and yet this was a $15 million movie with a lot of talent behind it. And the special makeup effects were designed by a studio that won an Emmy and an Oscar for their work, and is currently working on The Walking Dead. Dafuq?
And now for the obvious joke literally everyone made about the film:
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.