Customer Reviews

Grace

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I'm a bit torn on how to review "Grace." As a drama, it does have fairly decent suspense and a slow burn kind of pacing. If you have a short attention span or enjoy gore, this will not be a worthwhile experience. As far as horror goes, it falls short of being frightening, though I do not think that was the plan. The disappointment in the reviews seem to come from expectations rather than the actual movie. At no point was I bored. In fact, it was a pleasant diversion to become immersed in the characters and the mother's slow decent into brutality in order to save her child.

"Grace" is generally presented as a believable story in its context, and is well acted for the most part. A mother desperate for a baby, and destined for a stillborn child, miraculously has the child survive, only to find eventually that blood is the only thing that keeps it alive. The plot is fairly creative and there is tension throughout the movie. Still, if Lifetime had a horror network, this would be its centerpiece.

"Grace" is certainly worth a watch if you adjust your expectations to include suspense rather than horror, and subtle terrors rather than blood.

I do not get to the horror/suspense BDs that often (Last House on the Left & Midnight Meat Train my last couple) but with the amount of material on this I had to give it a sit down. Overall, I was impressed with everything they had to offer on this, and even if you find yourself in that group of people questioning the writing, the Blu has plenty to satiate even the discerning viewer.

The story follows a mom and her stillborn/reanimated baby as they discover what it will take for them to survive. And without delving into being an actual horror/zombie baby film, they manage to show a low key, melodramatic (and as real as possible) take on this family's tale. There is little back story, and nothing given as to how this might have happened or why certain characters are involved to the level they are, so if vague plot lines bother you, skip it. Most of the complaints out there follow the lack of what I described, but in the end, and as sick as the last scene is, this still left with me the feel of seeing a competent and twisted film. Now the good stuff.

The picture quality looks decent, but the grain shows through more often than not with the volume of indoor night shots. The sound is a mixed bag depending on which you select. There is a choice of 5.1 DD or PCM Uncompressed. I chose the latter after testing 12 different scenes containing the fly buzzing sounds and outright channel saturation (the airbag deployment for instance), and without hesitation, I say watch this in the PCM - louder, better and more articulate. The special features rock and include:

* Grace at Sundance - 13 minutes. Includes some behind the scenes of what it is like to get into the famed festival, and everything one might encounter in getting your film accepted/marketed while there. The defining moment for me was seeing the director's mom have to comment on stage about the film - and she answered very politically correct for having just seen a demented film.
* Grace Conception - 6:46 minutes. The short film history behind this title.
* Grace Delivered - 37 minutes. The main making-of, logistics, interviews and everything one needs to know in what it took to make this. I actually liked this piece as it stays away from the fluffy interviews I hate and delved deep into the heart behind this.
* Grace Family - 12 minutes. Description of the family dynamic behind these characters, helps answer some of the questions one might have about why certain things occur in the film.
* Her Mother's Eyes, Look of Grace - 7 minutes. A thorough take on the production design and visuals.
* Lullaby Scoring Grace - 9 minutes. Catered to those that love low key haunting score backgrounds, with plenty on the work that went into how long this took to make. Includes some good info on the fly sounds.
* Commentaries that are fine, but I found difficult to sit through as this film was too tough in seeing twice and the listed supplements cover everything better.

Three and a half for the film, one and a half for the extras and sound quality. If you are looking for a non expletive, twisted little independent, I think you will like this, but without question this film will make you feel uncomfortable. Enjoy.

Babies are considered the hope for the future. However, in the realm of horror movie filmmaking, ever since the 1968 masterpiece Rosemary's Baby they are used instead either as a source of fear and even sometimes as an omen of impending apocalypse. While Grace is a film that fits into the tiny maternal-fright genre, it is sadly more of an inferior, schlock fest than the glowing Sundance advance reviews would have you believe. What a pity.

The plot of Grace concerns a mother's relationship with her baby of the title. Grace is the kind of baby that needs special food. No, one does not mean organic. It is rather that of the red kind.

While Rosemary's Baby had its psychological angle to freak out its audience, and It's Alive, though not great by any means, had a fun and campy sense to its material, Grace seems to want to play it completely straight in both tone and plot structure, a bit like The Brood. Problem is, despite this exact plot never being quite done before, the film still feels pretty ordinary.

Grace just never rises above its rote mechanics. It feels at if it tries to coast on its disturbing themes, but despite an eerie music score, the film barely emotes. It chooses to behave in a way any horror genre connoisseur thinks it will, but this also leaves it without depth or originality, and Grace is hardly even fun or thrilling. It may try to go with a slow-buildup, but things do not exactly simmer interestingly, and any real themes on the subject of motherhood and nursing etc. seem petite. Furthermore, the splatter feels routine and much too easy.

Structure wise Grace is also comparable to Lucky McKee's film, May, in terms of slow-crawl buildup to a blood-spilling finish. Yet, director Paul Solet lacks that uncanny wit that McKee displayed so efficiently. Moreover, Solet also shows his narrow-mindedness further when the film ends with one of those annoying tacked on shocks only present to set up a sequel.

This end is also too telling: as this also shows that one can guess each plot turn the movie will take in more non-thrilling and scare-lacking ways. For that reason, Grace should never be considered a standout student in classroom for any filmmaking generation to come.


Grade: 3.5 / 10 (In 0.5 Increments)

When I say this movie is a bloodbath, I don't mean that it's a typical slasher film. I mean there is literally a lot of blood in it. Blood oozes, spills, pools. However, it's all to good purpose. It all has a point. But if such a sanguine sight makes you squeamish, this is not the film for you.

The jacket of this DVD also might be a little misleading in that it suggests another "bad seed" sort of baby - another psychopathic monster. But that isn't it either. This movie is more inventive than that. The infant Grace poses a different sort of problem for anyone taking care of her. Grace is a unique special needs child.

The acting here is excellent, and the premise challenges the viewer to consider, "What would I do?"

When I pick up a DVD, it isn't about extras. I hate it when it becomes about that, too, and I think I'm venting a little because a few high-profile reviews outside of Amazon were built on this heading. I don't know when things got this way and started building on the extra bus but I do know this: If I buy something like a movie it is about a movie I want to watch and my hopes that depend on the genre expectation. With this flick, I have to say that I was not expecting a lot because it is a movie with a little bottle on it and a description that made me think it was either a B-movie that could make me laugh or a surprise that could make me happy. a lot of early reviews made me think it was going to be the surprise part, too, because they had quite a few things to say on the good side of the movie. Then i watched the thing, saw it was jammed with extras, and wondered if that was why it scored so highly. I know it wasn't the movie - it was funny here and cheap there, and it was likeable if you want that - because I thought it would be better.

Well, maybe I didn't think it would be better but I did have some hopes.

There are a lot of reviews that tear the movie down into little slices, so you can pan for those if you need that. I just want to say that, given my choices of movies, this was not high on my list of memories. I did like it: I had time to burn, laughed a few times, and had some friends that said, "that was descent." Read about the movie and imagine why it could be that word, descent, and you probably hit the nail on the head. If you need a baby horror, look up some Japanese thrillers or some Korean horror and you can find yourself going past campy and getting into horrifically weird. Sadly, this plotline keeps on keeping on and, well, it needs a booster shot.

Time killer, no thriller - I really wanted to want this.

I don't usually watch horror flicks, but a couple of my friends enjoy them, so I thought I'd try Grace, which had an interesting premise.

It had pretty good production values and good actors. That part I liked. And the baby (when they showed a real one) was cute. But frankly, I was bored. Yes, the baby wants blood to drink, but that's more creepy than scary. I didn't find much in the way horror or surprises. There wasn't much dialog, and the pacing was very slow. Much of the time I had the DVD playing at 2x speed with subtitles, so I could still see what little dialogue there was. It was mostly a waste of my precious free time.

*This review contains spoilers of the non-vegetarian variety*

Grace is one of those movies that will probably be far more disturbing to a woman than a man. That being said, disturbing is about where this movie ends at being worthwhile. It isn't a terrible film, and I'm not sure it could have been presented any better. There is something indefinable that grates on the nerves, if I had to try and put a finger on it that would probably be how unsubtly we are drawn toward the inevitable conclusion of the film.

That may have been the titular problem of Grace, the fact that while it contains many things that women would find horrifying the film is determined to beat you over the head with them, making the gut wrenching grotesqueries ultimately laughable. The way that Grace is presented; an undead baby that has to feed on living blood, is painful. Especially when we take into account how deeply the mother wanted a baby and how important this was to her family. Throwing in the judgmental mother in law, ethical quandaries of a vegan main character, and creepily obsessed ex-girlfriend, and we're left with something very disturbing.

Unfortunately for all the simplicity of the way the film was made the effects are at times difficult to get along with. Some of the flies are so fake it's painful, because Grace is a movie that has a very raw and honest appearance. When you have almost no special effects it is important that those put into the film flow. You end up losing the suspension of disbelief that the movie requires, and are left almost laughing at the actions of the harried mother.

I really wanted to like Grace, while the ending was strangely annoying to me - after all how are you going to handle a toddler eating others, she can't breastfeed forever - the film had some very good points. The agony of the main character is very real and her desire to keep her child healthy and fit is also important. Her neurotic obsessive vegan behavior was more than slightly grating, but she's a bit insane...that's a given!

Unfortunately within five minutes of the end credits I began to think on all the ways the movie wasn't believable to me. It was too over the top, too obvious, and resolved so suddenly with such a prolonged buildup and inevitably if a movie is going to leave you with that feeling it probably isn't worth watching more than once.

Is Grace a terrible film? No! Is it a great or even good film? Certainly not! It is worth watching once, contemplating, and then putting aside in your mind before you begin to pick it apart like a fly going up your nose and out the other nostril picks up snot? Possibly, but probably not.

Grace is an independent horror film from 2009 that would probably have been better with a higher budget. It's a horror film that wants to rely on atmosphere and simmering suspense to engage the viewer rather than blood and gore, but with a small budget must forsake atmosphere in favor of mystery. The blurb on the back of the DVD is fairly accurate and it does feel a bit like a Stephen King story...Unfortunately, it's like one of his weaker ones:

Madeline (Jordan Ladd) and her husband Michael (Stephen Park) are expecting their first baby and plan to deliver with a midwife, instead of a hospital delivery. After a (random) accident, Michael is dead and Madeline discovers that the baby has died inside her. Having already suffered two miscarriages and being overwhelmed with grief, she decides to carry it to term. When the baby is born, it is willed back to life through Maddy's love for it and is named Grace. Upon returning home, everything seems fine until Maddy starts to notice something disturbing about her new baby.

As other reviewers have noted, the film doesn't go the way you'd expect with a psychopathic or possessed child. Writer/director Paul Solet is a little more inventive, yet it's his script that is one of the film's weakest points. It's hard to describe what the problem is exactly, as Grace moves at a slow pace yet the film sort of jumps right into the story and begins piling on the twists. It's strange but it doesn't feel like Solet had enough material to fully flesh out his story. At 84 minutes, it's a pretty short film yet it grows fairly tedious. Worse, there's a contrived story element about a former lesbian relationship which adds absolutely nothing to the story and wouldn't have made the characters any less believable without it.

For an amateur production with a no-name cast, much of it actually looks pretty impressive. Ladd does a good job as Maddy, making her a believable mother, willing to do anything to protect her child. There are no bad performances here, but Ladd stands out alongside the effective Samantha Ferris as the sassy, smart mid-wife. Gabrielle Rose, as the domineering mother-in-law Vivian also does a commendable job. With this cast, I think Solet would have made a better film if he had evened out his script a bit and had more control over his style as a director. There were times where it appeared he had captured a look that suited his film, but it disappears after a few moments. I blame the lack of budget though, not Solet himself. Another downside is there are scenes that actually reek of straight-to-video, but there is genuine suspense in the last few minutes of the movie and I applaud Solet for not going for an easy shot or story development like many horror directors would.

Grace shows Paul Solet's potential to make something really good and it is well-made with an original premise, but it's just not particularly engaging or impressive. There are scenes that are shocking and suspenseful, but many scenes just kind of tread along tediously while the ending, which wants to shock, is ultimately just "meh." While Grace isn't a complete waste of time, it's a mostly forgettable horror film that some will appreciate for its originality and many will hate for not meeting their expectations.

GRADE: C

"Grace" is the second most disturbing film dealing with pregnancy and motherhood I've seen this year! Where "Inside" was intense and kept you on the edge of your chair for 90 minutes, "Grace" is more disturbing, and has you squirming in your seat for that hour and half.

"Grace" starts off simply with a young couple expecting their first child, they've had trouble conceiving and want the best for their unborn daughter. They are very picky about the medical care she's receiving, switch doctors and finally settling on a mid-wife for prenatal care and delivery. Mom is avoiding red meat, caffine and taking up the vegan lifestyle. All the new-age, best for baby crap they've been shoveling down expectant mothers' throats for the past decade, these folks are doing. But all of the goes out the window real quick after a car accident seems to kill the baby while still in the womb. The mom heartbroken decides to carry the infant to term and deliver the dead child as if it were stillborn. The only hitch is that the baby isn't dead. The baby is alive.....and hungry.

The movie takes so many twists and turns, and each one progressively more disturbing than the last. Jordan Ladd who is stunning to look at, turns in a top notch performance as the expectant mother who will do anything for her young baby, playing the character as part victim and part nutjob perfectly. The rest of the cast do a great job as well. The gore flows pretty freely, and seeing a beautiful little baby girl plopped into some of these scenes will have even the die-hard gore hounds squirming a bit.

Don't go into "Grace" expecting something edge of your seat like "Inside" or corny fun like "It's Alive", "Grace" creates an unsettling tone from the beginning and just keeps chugging forward. At times you want to look away....but you can't!! Even if you don't care for the film, it won't be one you'll forget.

I never used to be a horror movie type person until I got into the vampire craze with TrueBlood, so I thought I'd give this movie a go. Taking into account that I was warned on the DVD cover to 'view at my own risk', I have to say it wasn't a bad movie, just a bit convoluted and a tad too bloody for my taste, some of it seemed just gratuitous gore thrown in for shock effect. I didn't realize that the husband was killed in the car wreck because it wasn't made clear until late in the film when his mother, the bizarre mother-in-law from hell, makes a play to get the baby, even going so far as buying a breast pump and trying to lactate herself so she can feed the baby (little did she know.....) And it really becomes a total chick flick after the husband's unfortunate demise.

The thing that drew me in was the naked power of mother-love that came across in almost visible concentric waves through the screen when the baby is born dead. That Madeline wills her dead child back to life was, strangely enough, perfectly believable. I could relate to that as a mother. How could she know she was creating a flesh-eating zombie-tyke?!

Overall, it fits the bill as advertised, but I was disappointed at the ambiguous ending, hence my three stars.