Customer Reviews

The Devil's Curse

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

 

 

The Devil's Curse is a horrible film. I can't remember the last time I watched a horror flick that had *zero* suspense and atmosphere. I seriously mean it- NO suspense, NO atmosphere, and nothing remotely interesting about any of it.

A group of college kids spend time in an abandoned building. You could seriously let a raccoon with rabies loose in the building and I'm willing to bet that would offer more in the way of actual fear than what this poor excuse of a film provides.

I simply can't recommend it to anyone. You'd have to be the most desperate person in the world to watch it.

I'm talking about someone who's been on a deserted island for over 15 years and once they came back to civilization, they're absolutely dying to see a horror film more than anything else. That's the only person who'd get any kind of enjoyment out of this crap.

Yes, there's a twist at the end of the movie. That doesn't make up for the other 90% of painful boredom I had to experience.

Please skip it.

I'll warn you ahead of time. If you are expecting this to be anything other than a cheesy movie, you'll be incredibly disappointed. This is pure cheese, from the "shot in broad daylight" outside lighting to the "mysteriously well lit abandoned building" effects.

The movie follows several attractive college students who decide to spend the weekend at an abandoned building that had a sinister past. As the night wears on, people begin to die one by one as evil stalks their every move. But what exactly is going on? Can any of them survive the night or are they all doomed?

This movie wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either. The ending is easily the best part of the movie & I'm honestly tempted to give it 3 stars just because of that. It's just that the rest of the movie dragged on for so long that the movie felt like it was at least an hour longer than it actually was. The movie tries too hard to be the creepy psychological horror film & it kind of killed off some of the fun of the movie- especially the abandoned building part. There just felt like there could have been more done with it. The acting is nice enough & they interact well enough. It just wasn't enough to carry the film.

This isn't something that I would recommend buying unless you've seen it & you know that this is something you want to own. It may be worth a watch for the people who like horror movies, but anyone else would be better off skipping this one.

There is one thing right that is mentioned at the start of the movie but at the same time what is mentioned also plays on people's fears(the point of a horror movie), This movie tries to play a Catholic angle then gets into a What's Going on/Whodunit?, It is boring and when the End comes there is a twist if it can be called that,the only thing correct is Yes Evil Exists but you should never play with it, at least the movie didn't have gore but it fails miserably as a snorefest.

The movie is your avarage atmospheric spookfest or so you think.. Until the end of the film. The director and writers throw a real nice curve ball at you. I won't tell you what it is just that it actually makes the film worth watching. Don't expect mass gore or monsters, that is not going to happen. This movie is pure mental. Also, watch the special features portion of the DVD, the background about the filming of the movie is just as entertaining. Apparently the set for the film is haunted and the enitre crew experienced the ghosts.

<strong>Credo</strong> (Toni Harman, 2008)

I've gotten a string of pretty crappy low-budget horror flicks recently, and thus <em>Credo</em> was something of a surprise. It doesn't quite get the whole "here's how you set up a twist ending" thing down, but it's well-acted and atmospheric, and it's obvious someone put some real thought into this script.

Plot: five friends get kicked out of their London flat after a party turns sour. There's Alice (<em>The Descent</em>'s MyAnna Buring), the studious one, who spends all her time cramming for finals; party-boy Jock (<em>The Matrix Reloaded</em>'s Clayton Watson), an American exchange student whose antics got them thrown out in the first place; Jazz (<em>The Bill</em> regular Rhea Bailey), Jock's sometime girlfriend; Scott (<em>The Complete Map of the Universe</em>'s Mark Joseph), an electronics whiz with a horrible crush on Alice; and Timmy (<em>Just Ines</em>' Nathalie Pownall), Alice's best friend. Alice, of course, retreats to the library instead of looking for another place to stay, but when it closes and she's sitting in an all night coffee shop, she gets a call from Scott saying Jock has found them another place to stay. Turns out he has a friend who does security at an abandoned monastery where, urban legend has it, five divinity students tried to summon Belial, after which four committed suicide (or the demon made it look that way) and the fifth went crazy. Needless to say, there's a reason the place has stood abandoned since...

<em>Credo</em> is Harman's only feature film; she normally makes direct-to-video how-to stuff about baby and child care. Which makes this even more surprising, and makes me wonder if I don't give the actors enough credit sometimes for the quality of a film; perhaps as long as you have a competent team behind the cameras, it <em>all</em> comes down to how good your acting talent is. And so you take a low-budget horror film and stock it with competent behind-the-scenes staff and then load up on decent-to-really-really-good acting talent and you come up with something that should really be a winner. For some reason, the Brits seem to excel at this (<em>Long Time Dead</em> and <em>Lie Still</em> immediately come to mind), and <em>Credo</em> is another good example. When it comes right down to it, the effectiveness of the atmosphere was pretty easy to pull off; you just keep things half-dark (thankfully, lighting techs Martyn Culan and Joel Rainsley understand the difference between keeping things dark and making this too murky to actually see; this is little surprise, given that Culpan has recently worked on slightly bigger-budget films like <em>The King's Speech</em> and <em>Four Brothers</em>) and add some spooky sounds and hey, instant atmosphere. What makes it work, or not, is how the characters react to it, and as long as you've got good enough actors, you're gold. Similar, you've got this script, and it's pretty darned good, and you throw bad actors at it, they're going to mess up the timing and delivery and all that jazz. You get actors who can really understand it and, well, you get this.

I should mention that a number of people seem disappointed/confused by the ending. You'll need to pay attention, and it is designed to be confusing there for a few minutes, but it makes absolute sense once you think about it. (Hint: take the first sequence at face value, and then pay very close attention to the last spoken line in the film, a flashback to an earlier scene, which explains the entire mechanism.) We're not talking timeless cinema here, but taken for what it is, it's quite good. ***

5 FRIENDS WERE KICKED OUT OF THEIR COLLEGE ROOMS BECAUSE OF THEIR PARTYING.JOCK HAS A FRIEND WHO TOLD HIM WHERE THEY COULD HANG OUT TIL THEY GOT ON THEIR FEET.THEY ALL GO THERE.LATER ON,THEY HEAR VOICES AND WEIRD NOISES.SOMETIMES THEY FEEL A PRESENCE.JOCK COMES ACROSS ANOTHER PERSON WHO'S IN THAT BUILDING.LATER,ONE BY ON-PEOPLE START TO DIE.THE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO GET OUT BUT THEY CAN'T FIND A WAY OUT.JASMINE GETS LOST IN THE CRAWLSPACE-WHAT A DOPE!ALICE IS AHEAD OF HER-AND SHE MAKES IT TO THE SPOT WHERE THEY WANT TO GO.THERE IS A SURPRISE ENDING,THOUGH.THE SURPRISE ENDING WAS THE BEST PART OF THE WHOLE MOVIE!