Customer Reviews

Seamstress

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The seamstress won't keep you on pins and needles, nor will it keep you in stitches. It just falls apart like a badly hemmed wedding dress. The script is as tangled as a spool of thread and the directors talent could not fill a thimble. The movie ends with a blatant murder by the heroine(Enough, Sleeping With the Enemy)-yeah, I've even seen that before. Don't buy, don't rent, don't even look at the dvd cover.

Allie's father has disappeared on an island, and she wonders if his connection to an old crime is responsible. A woman was brutally killed by an angry crowd, and her murderous ghost haunts those responsible for her death. While Allie and her friends search for her father, people start dying in increasingly horrifying ways. The story was confusing and choppy. It relied on film editing too much to tell the story. It could of been a great horror movie but it was just too cliche. It's a cheezy formulaic studio horror movie, not even worth a rental.

First, there's nothing especially new here. The film has several of the hackneyed horror elements: a group of young people, an isolated setting, a killer from the past, and an evil from the past recurring in the present. In this sense, it is rather like a combination of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Ghost Story. Oh yeah, and there's a fair amount of the characters having sex before the killing begins. So the movie's not all that original.

Then again, there isn't much that is original in American horror these days. So, taking the derivativeness as a given, I find this movie fairly good. Allie (Kailin See, Snowglobe) goes in search of her father, who has disappeared, perhaps in connection with an old series of crimes. As it happens, an innocent person was tortured by a mob for those crimes, and her ghost is out for revenge. That's pretty much the plot. The rest is more or less by the numbers, albeit with a fairly good cast, nice effects, and a small twist at the end to keep the film from being a one-dimensional cliché. There are certainly better films out there, but there are also worse films.

Hey kids! Do you remember a movie called The Blair Witch Project?

It was revolutionary at the time -supposedly real footage of missing teenagers who were investigating a witch. It featured confused actors running around in the dark, weird runes made of sticks, a map that led to nowhere, a victim who was wrongly accused of being a witch and thus became something much worse, and an invisible entity that slowly took apart her victims. But that was over ten years ago. None of you youngins actually saw that movie, right?

Toss in a little bit of The Ring, complete with a well, a creepy girl with long hair in a white dress, and a curse involving the number seven. Mix until half-baked. Then release onto unsuspecting horror fans.

What's so sad is that The Seamstress had potential. Any ghost that can sew your lips and eyes closed while you're still alive and string you up like a spider in a web of yarn is quite creepy. Tossed into this meat grinder are teenage stereotypes: the geek (James Kirk), the jock (David Kopp), the loose hottie (Sarah Mutch), the happy couple (Lara Gilchrist and Richard Stroh), and the conflicted Final Girl Allie (Kailin See). It seems that an angry mob of seven people falsely accused a woman (The Seamstress) of murdering children, and in retaliation mutilated her husband before disposing of them both. With her dying breath The Seamstress (Andee Frizzell) cursed her killers. Now she and her ghost husband (Aaron Pearl) are back for revenge and killing the seven off, one of which happens to be Allie's father (David Nykl). And now Allie is back, trying to figure out who murdered her father.

Thing is, one of the seven actually IS the murderer who killed all those kids. There are just two remaining, the angry sheriff with a bat (Lance Henriksen) and creepy guy (Kevin McNulty). Quick, guess which one is the real killer?

It doesn't matter. What does matter is that with the real killer going around killing the other killers, it messes up the witch's curse. I almost feel sorry for the Seamstress. How is she supposed to enact her ghostly vengeance when an honest-to-god serial killer is offing her victims? This film is one wink and a severed head away from Freddy vs. Jason.

Enter Allie. Her friends are perfect substitutes for the seven people the Seamstress was supposed to enact her revenge. Which is a bit like drinking Diet Coke when you really wanted a Coke - it's not the same, but you drink it because you have to do SOMETHING with your hands while you socialize.

For reasons that really make no sense except to the three writers (Three? Really?) that came up with Seamstress' script, ghost husband Ryan keeps appearing to warn people to come or go from the island where all the killing and the screaming takes place. It's like King Hamlet's ghost wandered off a Shakespearean play in pale face paint and can't figure out why nobody's taking him seriously.

Maybe it has something to do with the impenetrable darkness, the gotcha special effects, and the fact that the Seamstress does a lot of killing but not a lot of sewing. At one point I thought she was firing needles connected to threads from her fingers. That would have been cool. Too bad I couldn't see it.

But if you're looking for confused actors running around in the dark, weird runes made of sticks, a map that leads to nowhere, a victim who was wrongly accused of being a witch and thus becomes something much worse, and an invisible entity that slowly takes apart her victims then we have a movie for you.

This ain't it.

The Seamstress (Jesse James Miller, 2009)

After we finished watching this flick, my daughter thought about it for a while, and then gave her verdict: "it was weird. But I liked it." I'll buy the weird part, though I didn't like it nearly as much. It's another case of me hoping that Lance Henriksen will have finally gotten himself out of the slump that started with Pumpkinhead. He's made a handful of decent-to-good movies since (Paranoia 1.0, Appaloosa, etc.), but this is not one of them.

Allie (Kailin See, recently of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) is looking for her father, who disappeared a while back after leaving a mysterious note. (We see in the opening scene that this quest is pretty much doomed to failure.) When she tracks him down to the island where she's sure he went, she and the group of friends who tagged along in order to be slasher bait find out that her father was a member of a vigilante band who tortured and killed a woman (who was, of course, innocent), and the revenant of this woman is now the Seamstress, a supernatural killer with a lot of needles. Despite the fact that the Seamstress only seems to want revenge on her killers, Allie's friends start getting popped, and so we have the usual survival-horror tropes, except that you know who's going to survive, which makes it not too scary.

Not that it would have been too scary otherwise. The special effects are geared more towards trying to gross the viewer out, yet there's nothing at all here you haven't seen before, and the silliness of the concept combined with the oddly restrained special effects make me wonder if the person who actually designed the FX shots had hit puberty yet.

As for the acting, it's one of those things where you've got a director who seems to want to get bad acting out of his charges. Henriksen and See are obviously talented actors, and have shown it any number of times. Some of the supporting cast aren't bad, either (including appearances in big-screen efforts like X-Men 2 and Snakes on a Plane). And yet everyone involved turns in a performance as flat and unconvincing as possible. There's only one reason that ever happens: the director wants it that way. And Miller, well, he's gone back to documentaries. This is a good thing for everyone involved. * ½