Customer Reviews

The Sadness

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

this movie is a sordid and deranged one about an innocent little girl who is sold by her addict parents to settle a drug debt. In no time she is resold to wannabe satanist creeps( the main baddy is a Catholic priest by day! )who sacrifice her in the hopes of raising the devil. instead they conjure up an angry, vengeful wood spirit that helps the girl come back and wreck shop on all the scumbags who helped end her young life- then some people who were just plain mean to her right down tho the local schoolyard bully. Either they meant to make this movie look dirty and gritty, or it really is just cheap and low budget - it doesn't make a difference to me. The violence is pervasive and takes up most all of the story . It was a bit hard for me to watch the guy getting both his eyes drilled out slowly( some of it looks like snuff footage ) but frankly that's what I'm looking for when i buy something of this caliber. All in all not bad for what it is. It's ambitious beyond it's budget and probably a little sick even, but I was entertained for almost two hours straight and that's- what I like!

This movie has a little of everything. I was properly scared, grossed out, and I also got a lot of chuckles!! The best thing about this is it's story line--It is a GREAT revenge movie!!! I really loved it!! It is a great movie night movie for the teens and adults in the family. Buy it!!!

When I ordered this I wasn't really sure if it was going to deliver the goods. Holy crap was I wrong. This is basically a 2 hour kill-fest. It's definitely got a gritty look to it, but it adds to the flick, rather than detract from it. Don't let the run time fool you, it's long, but it's paced properly, there's no padding to it. It's definitely worth checking out.

The SADNESS is a great movie! John Caponigro is OUTSTANDING and the rest of the cast is excellent. A MUST BUY!

Super low budget indie flick along the lines of Devil Times Five, The Bad Seed, and a little bit of Bob Clark's Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. Despite it's production values, the little girl in the movie is straight up brutal and relentless. The last three quarters of it's 112 minute runtime are gory and well paced, basically the action doesn't slow down till the movie is over. I'd rather watch something like this any day compared to the garbage they are passing off as horror in the theaters. They all have huge budgets, but no cajones! I'd like to see what these guys could have done with more money. If you're a Chiller Theater buff, you will probably enjoy this one.

The Sadness (R. F. Pangborn, 2008)

Like most people who've seen it--the film is currently sitting on IMDB with a truly impressive 1.9 rating--I hated The Sadness with a passion rarely matched in my movie-watching experience. (To put that into perspective, if the movie had enough votes to be listed on the IMDB Bottom 100, that would put it somewhere between 37 and 44 on the list, four-tenths of a point away from the #1 spot.) No one's left a review at IMDB, so I don't know what caused the people who have rated it so low to rate it the way they did; did they just think it all-around sucked, or were they as disappointed in the potential this movie failed to realize as I was? I don't know, but that's what really got me. I saw bits of cleverness in the script, and I had the idea that Pangborn, who co-wrote the script with Ryan Citron and Mike Perrette (all first-timers), could have actually hit this one out of the park had he not spent all his money on cheap effects instead of hiring actual actors and a professional script doctor to correct the glaring errors that popped up whenever the script wasn't being as clever as it was.

Plot: the first hour of the film sets us up with a whole bunch of characters, and we take our time getting to know them (which is very surprising in a no-budget gore flick, and I have to give Pangborn points for trying). You won't understand for a while how all these stories cross paths, but give it time, it'll eventually get there. The main characters:

- A young girl (Alexa Werrlein), credited only as The Kid, whose drug-addled mother and her no-account boyfriend do little but abuse her and take drugs.
- Their drug dealers, whom we first meet when the female half of the team gets angry at a buyer and kills him because he claims (probably rightly) she shorted him on the deal.
- A band of Satanists. Note: one of the most confusing things for me, in the first half of the movie, was getting it through my head that the male and female (unmasked) drug dealers were different people than the male and female (masked) Satanists. That becomes VERY important about halfway through part 2, so keep it in mind.

You'll also meet some other folks who will eventually tie into things, such as The Kid's teacher (Jessica Spiess, also one of the film's producers) and a pair of cops.

Then comes part 2, where The now-deceased Kid returns from the grave to get revenge on, basically, everyone we saw so far in the movie who isn't killed by someone else.

Yep, that's it, an hour of setup and fifty-two minutes of revenge. Which if you think about it isn't all that uncommon; after all, the classic exploitation-revenge film, I Spit on Your Grave, has about the same ratio of setup to revenge, except all the setup in that one is exploitation, while Pangborn was willing to spend some time letting us get to know all these characters. Which would have been downright awesome if the first half of this movie had anything more than the barest level of coherence. The first fifteen minutes of it had me wondering why we were seeing these terribly-acted vignettes that had absolutely no relation to one another; I only actually figured it out when we saw the second vignette to contain characters we'd seen before. And while, as I've said, there were some very nice touches in the script that, with better actors, would have really been something, there's also some dialogue that can charitably be described as "godawful", including every single line spoken during the film by the female drug dealer (whose name I have obviously forgotten, if it was ever mentioned). So for me, the real letdown of this movie was that it could have been so much more than it is.

But now I'm going to get to the reason I think most people hated it. If you're going to blow 90% of your budget on gore effects... get some good ones. Really. Because the ones we have here are really that bad. Obviously fake knife touches abdomen. Cut to expression. Cut to pig intestines (obviously being held in actor's hand) sliding through fingers. Cut to killer's look of glee. Cut to puddle of pig guts on the ground between a pair of feet (whose owner is obviously standing much straighter than he would had he, you know, JUST BEEN DISEMBOWELED). I mean... wow. (And that basic sequence is repeated at least twice in the film. There may be a third time I'm not remembering.) You know those clever bits I was talking about above? That isn't one of them.

I'd like to see a remake of this movie, actually. Put Ron deCaro (who also casts his friends, but at least some of them can act their collective way out of a paper bag) or Pascal Laugier or Hisayasu Sato at the helm, clean up the script to highlight the clever bits of foreshadowing and the surprisingly good one-liners while fixing the plot holes and adding the bits of foreshadowing that weren't there and really needed to be, and I think you'd have a cult hit on your hands. What we have now, though, is a document of wasted potential. ½

I BROUGHT THIS MOVIE HERE ON AMAZON GOOD THIS I DIDNT PAY ALOT.
I HATE THIS MOVIE I TOOK IT TO A PAWN SHOP THEY GAVE ME A ONE DOLLAR FOR THIS MOVIE WHEN I WENT TO SELL IT. PLEASE DONT BUY THIS MOVIE