It's one thing to deceive the viewer in order to throw him off the track, to give him false leads, in order to present him with the end-twists that he couldn't/shouldn't anticipate. It's something entirely else to lie and cheat the viewer, such as is the case in this muda casa. Lying to the viewer is a cop-out, a desperate ploy that takes place when the writer and the director cannot think of an intelligent/logical way to set us up for the plot-twist.
And yet, only half-way through the movie, I had strong suspicions that Laura herself is the killer. How did I reach this conclusion, given the writer's lies and the director's pathetic manipulation? Simple logic: the movie had both apparitions AND a real-life murderer, something that isn't quite possible, i.e. the muda casa at first offers us a genre-meshing, almost paradoxical situation. A ghost and a real killer? I consider these two to be mutually exclusive in a horror film. (Though it undoubtedly could work in a ZAZ comedy.) This ghost/killer contradiction helped me reach the only explanation that was left, that the damn muda casa must have neither: no ghosts and no hidden killer. Hence: homely Laura must be the murderer.
So in spite of the lies and the shoddily set-up story, I still managed to predict the ending – and way before we were given the first hints that something odd is going on. (I am patting myself on the back as I write.) Perhaps remembering "Shrooms" helped. It's not as if this movie has a terribly original plot-twist.
We are cheated/lied to in the most blatant way possible: Laura is shown as the victim, while totally erroneous/fallacious scenes that could not possibly implicate her in the murders fill the screen. The only way this moronic premise could have worked, without being stupid, would have been to show ALL the early events from Laura's perspective i.e. literally from her viewpoint, as if she were holding a camcorder. This approach would have meant that we almost never get to see her (except when she looks in a mirror), which would have been an added bonus since the actress playing Laura is so damn unattractive. So everyone wins.
Alas, the film-makers had decided to treat the viewers as utter cretins instead, hence the swindle. They hoped that the crucial revelation that Laura is insane would somehow explain and justify their own cheating/lying, and all of the BS scenes early on; scenes that, with hindsight, mean absolutely nothing. Well, they failed.
The main premise/set-up is not the only source of rubbish in LCM. We also have a series of stupid things going on once Laura "escapes" (ha ha) from the not-so-silent house. She just happens to run into Nestor, her former lover, who calmly decides to inspect the house in spite of seeing her covered in blood and in utter panic. So calling the police first was not an option? OK, you could argue that he didn't want to call the cops because of the photos that are in there. Fine; then how about at least going up to the cellar with some sort of weapon? Nestor finds his ex covered with blood, in hysterics, sobbing about an attack, and yet Nestor goes up there, with no weapons, never even considering calling someone for help, and very predictably gets attacked. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Even more ridiculous is the scene when he leaves Laura in the car in order to briefly inspect the house - "BRIEFLY" being the key word here. He returns after just 18 seconds (!) with the following words: "there is nobody inside the house". That must have been one helluva lightning-fast house-inspection. 18 seconds for a house that big? I would think that an entire football team would need at least a few minutes to check the house completely for any potential intruders.
More nonsense. When Nestor goes up to the cellar, he finds neither a body nor any blood. He even makes a comment that the cellar hadn't been visited in a while. This implies that Laura must have killed her Dad downstairs – and yet where is the blood? Where is the body? Nestor should have seen either the body or some blood (or both) downstairs. Laura had no time to clean up the mess. Or did she? Of course, I forget that the writers and the director are LIARS and CHEATS, so perhaps Laura did clean up the living-room before Nestor's arrival in some ulterior universe in which the ACTUAL plot was going on – while we (the suckered viewers) were watching the FAKE VERSION of events, the stuff that never happened, the moronic-universe version of events, such as Laura sobbing, running away from a hairy arm going for her neck, the ghosts, and that crucially phony scene in which her father appears to be murdered upstairs in the cellar while Laura was downstairs.
To make matters worse, the movie has such an ugly – modern – look: it is an almost uni-colour film with nothing but shades of putrid green. (Horror) movies used to look beautiful/natural once upon a time in the 70s/early-80s, but nowadays most horror films are shoved through filters, made to look incredibly unappealing as if this ugliness somehow magnifies the horror. It doesn't; it simply makes the movie look ugly.
It's never even hinted why her two victims killed her daughter, nor is it even entirely clear whether they did! (Remember: she's nuts.) This renders the story even more pointless.
Furthermore, this damn boring casa drags on. The intro alone lasts an entire 17 minutes (an eternity in the horror genre), during which absolutely nothing happens. All we have in those 17 minutes is a crappy-looking actress and a movie that looks like a bird poo-pooed on it. I can find an ugly woman and bird-droppings myself, I don't need a movie for that.
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