Movie Review - The Road

The Road

2011

GMA Films : Freestyle Releasing / Freestyle Digital Media

8.5 / 10

If you're like me and enjoy a good movie, no matter what the language, then you should check out this Filipino gem.

What this film gives the audience is a story in three very different acts.

The first act is the present day where three friends "borrow" a car to go joy riding.  Though their version of joyriding isn't creating havoc on the road but to actually practise their driving.  While they're tootling around the town they see a police car and decide to try and find a quieter section of town.  They come across a fenced off lane and think it would be a good place to improve their driving skills.  However, it's not long before they find themselves in some scary and creepy situations.  The director Yam Laranas does a fantastic job of creating an eerie atmosphere, using shadows and light to their fullest.  The only thing I found annoying with the film was in this act... the girls really can scream... you need to turn the volume down before all the glass in your house explodes...

The second act starts to tell of the events that have led up to the present day events.  We travel back in time a couple of years to when two sisters disappear while travelling the road.  Adding to the creepiness of the earlier act the story now adds a dark and ominous feel as things become dangerous and deadly for the sisters.

The third act goes back twelve years to the very beginning and shows the psychological effects that a dysfunctional family in turmoil can experience, especially if one of the family is mentally unstable.  This is one of the strongest sections of the film as it resolves the mysterious parts of the story.  Laranas does a brilliant job of building atmosphere, once again.  This time he uses brightness and shadows to convey feeling.  Add the great acting of Carmina Villaroel who plays Carmela, a strong controlling independent woman caught in a loveless marriage due to having a child, a woman who runs hot and cold at the flick of a switch.

All of this makes the story much more interesting.   The writers, Aloy Adlawan and Yam Laranas, easily blend the styles and intricacies into a strong and believeable story that spread through the horror, thriller, psychological, and crime genres.

I would recommend this to all horror lovers and even to fans of thrillers, who wouldn't usually watch a horror movie.  This film really does work on so many levels.

This trailer does not portray how good this film really is.

Movie Review - It Follows

It Follows

2014

The Cast

The premise of this film is a good one - a person has sex and a supernatural spirit begins to follow them, with the intention of murdering them.  The only way for that person to survive the entity is to have sex with someone and pass the "curse" onto them.  Should they die then the spirit reverts back to following the last person once again.

Unfortunately, the premise is not fully utilised in the story, there are quite a few holes.  The main hole in the story is the origin of the "curse"; we are not told it is a curse, it may be something else; we are not told why the killings are happening; or how it all started.  These things deter from the story because at the end of the movie these issues made me feel as though the story was incomplete and lacking.

Had these issues been resolved it would have made the story and the movie a lot stronger, and possibly a lot darker and more haunting.

Taking that into consideration, what you do get in this movie is a strange surreal feeling, this is due to the direction and the soundtrack.  These are very reminiscent of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.  It's as though they had a baby and his name was David Robert Mitchell.

The opening scene has John Carpenter's Halloween written all over it.  The entire film took me back to my youth in the 80's and I loved it.  Sometimes, though, the soundtrack was too jarring, as Cronenberg's electronic soundtrack was apt to be, though here it doesn't work as well.

The acting is above average with the mostly unknown cast doing a pretty decent job of adding to the tension and atmosphere of the movie.  Even though there's not much gore, it's the palpable tension and atmosphere which make this a spooky supernatural story.

So if you like a slow burning taut eerie tale then this could be right up your street.

I give this an eerily spooky 5.75 out of 10.

The Trailer