Reviews

I really, really want to like this series and still have hopes for the rest of it... but this first episode gave me nothing. No, I'm not offended by any of the content - in fact, for half an hour Vice Principals kept me from my normal life which is much more hilarious and involves more creative cursing than the show did. I couldn't actually tell which parts were supposed to be funny, so whatever they were they didn't work. In a word - boring and awkward as stepping in dog s**t. But it didn't get funding from HBO based on the strength of that tedious episode, so there's definitely better coming down the pipe. My advice is to stay tuned.

I am a fan of horror in general. I even watch and appreciate pretty bad horror movies. But this - not only can I not appreciate it, I couldn't make it past 15 minutes. The writing is really unbelievably bad. As an example, Janet enters the apartment that she has already seen and even moved into, and she says "WOW!" and runs around looking at it like she's never seen it before. When Janet is alone in the apartment and hears a thump, she says out loud "Did anyone hear that?" ??? She proceeds to show all the signs of getting really freaked out, with no good cause. She says a lot of really stupid things to herself in a really wooden voice. Dialog quality similar to what 7-year-olds invent for their dolls to say to each other. There are too many B-horrors out there to waste time on this.

This was not good. In fact, it's a good example to demonstrate that just throwing together all of the typical ingredients of a good one doesn't necessarily work. This movie veers wildly between not showing enough in some scenes (long shots of empty rooms with somebody screaming off-camera, for which we sometimes never get any hint of the reason.) It's inconsistent and pays no attention to continuity. The pacing is bad, with no escalation of tension. People start wandering around in dazes more often and crying more often, but it still manages to not build tension.

To any filmmakers who happen to read these comments on movies like this - it isn't always a bad thing to be derivative. Go ahead and make a knock-off of the Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity. There are others like me who don't care about originality. But please, make it good. It doesn't have to be novel, but it does have to work.

I'm a big fan of low-budget horror, but this is unwatchable. Every minute of it is stupid and tedious. Made by people who have watched many horror films but never understood the hows and whys of them. Clichés taken out of context... which actually is interesting from a sociolinguistic standpoint. Unfortunately I don't think experimental deconstruction was the intended point of the film.

"When I was out there looking for Natasha, I saw something." "What did you see?" "I saw a guy in the road." "Well, why didn't you say something earlier?" "I JUST DIDN'T, ALRIGHT?!?"

Etc.

Etc.

As many of the other negative reviews have mentioned, the performances are really quite good. The concept is also interesting - an unidentified stalker filing the kids as they are filming each other. But I see two major downfalls in this film - one is the poor use of a terrible soundtrack over the last 1/3 of the film. It shouldn't have one at all (found footage, remember?) - and it's also badly done. WAY too loud, you can't even hear the dialogue through it. The other flaw is that too much time is spent on chaos without obvious cause. The group of friends start freaking out and running around too quickly, and then it just continues in that manner for what seems like an eternity. Of course, once everything falls apart, there's nowhere else to go.

It's a shame. Wasted opportunity.

This movie has gotten a lot of terrible reviews here, so I feel the need to add another positive one. If you love horror movies and don't confuse "gory" with "scary" - and if everything doesn't have to be spelled out for you in an unrealistic expository scene - don't miss this gem.

Most horror movies either insult the audience a little by over-explaining, or they leave many elements simply unexplained (which can be a plus too.) This one actually gives you all the clues you need to put it together and get the answers. Really, it's all there - if you are observant, you don't need the characters to spell it out for you. I found the characters and dialog very believable (for a horror film, of course.) And a HUGE plus - no fake scares. Plenty of real ones. My boyfriend screamed out loud once, and I don't think I've ever heard him do that. I give it 8/10 because while I'm not likely to put it in my top ten films of all time, it was an immensely entertaining movie.

Really. Absolutely atrocious. I won't bother with a lot of detail because the many flaws have already been touched upon by the other negative reviews on this site. The entire thing suggests that Ridley Scott does not understand the first thing about science - he must have slept through the science lessons in primary school, even. Acting... I'm embarrassed for all of them. Those performances seem to have been pulled out of cans. Pork-n-beans acting, that's what I feel like calling it. The look of it seems to be impressive to many people, but it is only so in the sense that it looks very expensive. It's very *big.* Everything is big, flashy... but there is no beauty or subtlety to the images. Even the bigness of it all gets a bit tiresome, eventually. The only way to see this movie as a success is if you place it in a category with "The Room" - take a group of friends and make like you're on MST3K. It's so jaw-droppingly bad, you can actually have a lot of fun with it.

First, the part of the film that makes it worth watching - the performances. The fear, pain and emotional anguish displayed by the characters is extremely compelling, and natural human empathy forces us to cringe and gasp. In that way, it succeeds very well at being scary. However, in order to produce a situation for them to display said emotions, the filmmakers had to bend too many rules to ignore. Anyone who has been skiing will not believe the circumstances that leave them stranded. Anyone who has been hiking will not believe in the 24-hour wolves. But anyone who has ever been cold will not believe that they never even zip their jackets up all the way! Even while they are talking about freezing to death, and while their faces crack and bleed from frostbite, their collars lay open. They were wearing scarves too, but left them tucked under their jackets rather than trying to shield their supposedly stinging faces.

So, yeah, it's a wild ride because you can't help but feel their pain, and also because the gore/injuries are extremely real-looking - but rather than feeling pity, I only felt angry with them for making me cringe. WHY did they refuse to zip up their frigging jackets?!?!?! There are other, more fundamental, flaws with this film for sure, but it's the plethora of small, immediate (visual,) wrong details like that which ultimately lessened the experience for me.