Wednesday, October 27, 2021

The Devil Below: Expect The Expected

I like it when movies pleasantly surprise me. I try to focus on movies that I think sound interesting, or have gotten good word-of-mouth, or have some historical importance, or have a premise that sounds interesting to me. Sometimes, however, when I’m having trouble settling on a film, I’ll default to something that looked…not interesting, necessarily, but slightly more novel than the average found-footage/zombie/demonic possession fodder that clogs up any streaming service out there. Maybe it’s from another country, or maybe the setting isn’t something that’s been totally overdone, or maybe the premise doesn’t sound quite as hackneyed, or shit, maybe I just like the thumbnail.

Whatever the reason, I generally don’t go into these with the sort of high hopes I have for my first-choice films, and there have been a few times I’ve given up maybe 10 minutes in because the writing or acting was so risible that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit through the whole thing, but there’s always that hope that it’s going to be better than I expected, that I’ve found a diamond in the rough.

And that’s what makes The Devil Below such a frustrating experience. It’s mediocre on balance, but every now and then you can see glimpses of a better movie struggling to assert itself. It makes attempts to transcend its limitations, but it never really gets there.

We open on a couple of coal miners - one older, one younger - coming up to the surface, ready to end their shift. They’re father and son, and as it turns out, Dad’s in charge of the operation. His son’s asking for him to reconsider firing a miner who’s been screwing up on the job. Dad’s worried that he’s endangering the safety of the crew, and his son points out that he’s got a lot going on at home and losing his job is the last thing he needs…and just like that, something snatches the younger one from behind a container. His father tries to give chase but ends up getting jabbed by some large, barely-glimpsed talon, and injured, he is only able to lie there as his son gets dragged away.

Flash forward about 40 years, to a young woman looking over maps of rural Kentucky, noting locations, borders, roads and trails. She leafs through old newspaper articles about a massive underground coal fire that completely consumed the mining town of Shookum Hills. The fire still burns to this day (which is an actual thing) and the town - along with all of its residents - vanished without a trace.

The woman is Arianne. She’s a guide, someone who is very good at getting people places, no matter how remote or hostile. She’s been hired by Darren, a geologist at Cambridge, to get him and his crew to the former location of Shookum Hills. Darren thinks that there’s a very rare mineral in the mine that’s causing the coal they were mining to keep burning so hot for so long, and he wants to take samples, to publish a paper about it. So it’s him, Arianne, Shawn - another geologist with some…interesting…beliefs, their tech guy Terry, and Jaime, who provides security. The locals aren’t helpful, telling them that they’ve never heard of Shookum Hills, and soon enough, a car tries to force them off the road. Arianne shakes the pursuer and backtracks to discover an overgrown road off the main highway, at the end of which is an electrified fence. The kind you use to keep someone out…

…or keep something in.

As it turns out (and we know this because of the opening flashback), the miners of the Shookum Hills Mining Company delved too greedily and too deep, and woke something up. The few locals who remain are doing what they can to keep it contained, and then along comes Darren and company, and, well, they fuck it all up.

The film does start with some promise - you’ve got four dudes and a woman going on this expedition into Appalachia to discover what happened to an old mining town. That strikes me as an interesting premise - I do love me a “group explores forbidden territory” movie. In lesser hands, this would have been about four posturing fratboys and the woman who ends up crumbling as soon as things go bad and maybe ending up a love interest for one of the other protagonists. In a much lesser movie, she’d have to go skinny-dipping or strip down to a thin, clingy tank top for reasons. But luckily, this is never that movie. None of the guys are especially annoying and Arianne, rather than being there solely to be put in peril, is tough, capable, and competent. And even better, she’s treated as such by the men. So they aren’t really reduced to caricature, as easy as that would have been. But on the other hand, there’s also not really a lot there to replace caricature. Darren…is English. Shawn…has some weird ideas. And Terry and Jaime don’t even have that. They aren’t much more than ciphers.

This dull functionality extends to the way they act as well. Their behavior sort of wavers between being sensible and believable and the exact opposite of that, depending on the needs of the plot. At some points they’re competent and professional and act like human beings would, and then at others they completely abandon that, not as a reaction or response to something that’s happened or because of some character flaw, but just because they need to do this now for the story to move forward. You basically have two groups - the protagonists, who have stumbled into a situation they don’t understand and have made it much worse, and locals, the remnants of the town’s population who have stayed behind to keep this threat contained. You can forgive the protagonists for being massively out of their depth, but the people who stayed behind, once things start getting bad, don’t really seem to have a plan despite having been tasked with containing this particular problem for the last 40 years or so. It seems largely like they exist to give us a couple of different groups to be menaced and picked off throughout the film instead of just one. If it’s possible, they have even less personality than the protagonists, and so it’s very difficult to get invested in them.

So you’ve got characters who have the potential to be something other than business as usual, but aren’t. On top of that, you’ve got a story that has the potential to be something other than just a monster movie, but isn’t. The film makes some feints toward being a story about science versus faith as explanations for phenomena. Darren is very much a man of science, but Shawn is a geologist who (somewhat improbably) believes in intelligent design, but apart from one or two on-the-nose arguments up front and some borderline-hamfisted dialogue later on,  it’s never really developed, and it could be. Faith defies empiricism, which is fine as a way to find meaning in life, but is sort of crummy if you’re trying to figure out how something works, and science is constantly reevaluating its claims in the light of new evidence. A monster is just a species we’ve never seen before. That could make for some interesting character development (as it is in Final Prayer), but here it’s not really central to the story in a way that it could be. It’s just some stuff people say and then it gets forgotten until the next time somebody has to say something.

But I can forgive a certain amount of generic character or absence of thematic depth if there’s an evocative mood, or a real sense of tension or momentum to film. Get me caught up in the ride, and it’s easy to ignore the other stuff. But again, here, the film doesn’t really give us a lot to feel. The cinematography is fine, lots of overcast shots of abandoned mining territory and orange-lit cave systems, but when it comes down it, the potential weak point to any monster film is going to be the monster. You need a really big budget to come up with monsters that can remain convincing on camera for extended periods of time, and this film clearly doesn’t have either. For the first two acts it’s okay - you only get brief, shadowy glimpses and it doesn’t hurt believability. But by the climax they are by necessity on screen a lot, and it becomes very clear that it’s just some people in costumes and some dodgy CGI. The filmmakers try to paper over this with visual distortion, presumably due to the conditions underground, but it’s kind of clear that that’s why they’re doing it. It calls attention to the artifice, so it doesn’t really help. On top of that, the design of the monster…which we get a clear glimpse of in the second act as a sketch one of the locals made…is, frankly, silly. And that’s the nail in the coffin on that part of the film, right there.

So we have featureless characters in an openly mechanical story being menaced by an unconvincing threat, but probably the film’s biggest problem (apart from the third act, which is shapeless and disjointed and consists of a lot of things happening purely because they need to) is how it never really surprises the viewer. A few months ago I talked about Last Shift as a film that knew how to play sequences out of kilter with what audiences have come to expect, to generate real tension and surprise out of scenes that could have been very predictable. By contrast, this film plays it exactly how you’d expect. Every time. You see setups coming a mile away, and those setups do exactly what you think they’re going to do at exactly the moment you expect them to do it. Nothing about this film surprises apart from the characters not being quite as cartoonish as they could be, and the ending - while it had the potential to do something darker - ends as safely and predictably as any other film, made competently but without much imagination or vision, would.

Not all of this is the filmmakers’ fault. Monster movies are a tough proposition, and horror films rarely get the kind of budget you need to realize something truly inhuman in a way that’s going to be convincing over long stretches on screen. But the rest of it didn’t have to be this way. If you don’t have the budget for a truly spectacular creature, then give us characters we care about, or a story that dares to be something a little smarter than “people go into mine, get picked off one-by-one,” or creates tension through atmosphere or surprising choices on a scene-by-scene basis. But when you know what to expect, and that’s what you keep getting, it’s never going to rise above a level of dull competence. It’s a film forgotten as quickly as it is watched, and that’s too bad.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Dead & Buried: Sometimes, Dead Is Better

Every now and then, you’ll see a film described as a “curiosity.” This usually means that it’s not all that well-known, and isn’t necessarily typical for its time, but has some quality that makes it worth considering nonetheless. It’s easy to forget that in any given time period a lot of films get made, but not all of them get remembered. So, for example, if you think about horror films in the late 60s, you’re probably thinking about Rosemary’s Baby, not Spider Baby. And Rosemary’s Baby is excellent, no doubt, but Spider Baby has a unique charm and vision of its own that owes absolutely nothing to the former film, and it’s largely sat in obscurity. So when you stumble on one of these films that the zeitgeist has forgotten, they can be a real treat.

This is very much the case for Dead & Buried, which got made in the middle of the first wave of slasher films (a genre that’s become synonymous with the late 70s and into the 80s), but owes very little to that style of filmmaking. It does have its problems, but it’s also entirely its own thing and defies easy expectation a lot of time.

The film opens on a small coastal town in New England called Potter’s Bluff. There’s a man walking along the beach, taking photographs of nature, of fishing nets, seabirds, and then into his viewfinder comes an attractive young woman. They get to talking - he’s a professional photographer, she asks if he’s famous, it gets flirty, then it gets flirtier, then it gets blatantly sexual as she comes on to him…

…and then he’s surrounded by villagers, who -with the woman’s assistance - begin to beat him with shovels and bats, before tying him up and burning him alive, filming the entire thing.

Enter Dan Gillis, the local sheriff. He’s a local boy made good - went up to the big city to get a Master’s degree in criminology before coming back to Potter’s Bluff to take care of law enforcement. And now he’s looking at what appears to be the aftermath of an especially gruesome accident. There’s a car, overturned and burnt out, with a man - the photographer, as it happens - trapped inside. It looks like he burned to death in there, but something about it doesn’t sit right with Dan, so he consults with William Dobbs, the local mortician, and begins an investigation. There’s something strange going on.

So the basic narrative spine of this film is the small town with a dark secret, and the film does a good job of leveraging that feeling of small-town intimacy to create a pretty solid sense of paranoia throughout. Everyone’s friendly, everyone seems normal, and it’s not immediately apparent why some of the fine folks of this village are murdering tourists. Dan goes down a very dark, very strange rabbit hole over the course of the film, and it largely pays off. The rhythm of the film is a little perfunctory, leaning a little more towards a connected series of set pieces rather than a single organic story, but the filmmakers do a good job of setting up the important twists and reveals at a good pace, so it holds your attention and manages some very solid surprises. Most importantly, the whole game isn’t given away all at once - the “what” of the film is revealed bit by bit, but it isn’t until the absolute last moments of the film that you really get a sense of “why,” and even then there’s room for one last audacious reveal. This is a film that is very good at knowing when to drop the next surprise in your lap.

It also works well because it isn’t afraid to create a mood and commit to it. Since it’s set in a coastal New England town, everything is weather-worn buildings and gray, cloudy days and lights cutting through thick fog at night. A lot of this film is bluish and backlit, and it’s not very subtle in that regard, but it definitely helps maintain an atmosphere, and there’s a lot of very, very good practical effects work that still really holds up today, making it effectively creepy and gruesome without being especially gory. It’s not the obvious hatchet to the face of its slasher-film contemporaries, it’s something more evocative and uncomfortable than that, and combined with the small-town paranoia and the relentless gloominess, it’s a pretty uneasy experience, especially considering its age.

But speaking of age, in a lot of ways it is still definitely a product of its time. The dialogue is pretty stagey throughout, not all of the effects work holds up equally well, and the acting ranges from absolutely fine to scenery-devouring. And if you came of age in the 1970s, some of the casting is probably going to be a bit distracting. But then yet again, in some instances this actually works for it. At points it makes things feel nicely off-kilter, like a lighthearted TV movie about the wacky folks in a small town took a very dark turn at some point when you weren’t looking. And for a film made in the middle of the masked-killer craze, it really feels more like it’s riffing on things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even The Stepford Wives to some degree, and is even sort of adjacent to H.P. Lovecraft in his less cosmic mode. It’s a bold choice, and it pays off in both a sustained sense of paranoid uneasiness and in some surprising little choices in some scenes, culminating in a third act that is an absolute ride, capped by an ending that I can only describe as bonkers in its staging and its final reveal. If you stop to think closely about it, it’ll fall apart a little and there’s some stuff that isn’t ever really explained or resolved, but that didn’t really bother me at all while I was watching it - I was just letting it wash over me and getting swept up in the strangeness of it all. You don’t see films like this much anymore, and hell, you didn’t even see movies like this when it was new. It’s definitely worth a look.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

The Whisperer In Darkness: Beyond Space And Time

After last week’s film left kind of a gross taste in my mouth, I felt up for something a little more…I dunno, wholesome?...for this week. This is definitely not my usual thing, being all “horror should be bleak and intense, it’s art, not entertainment” and whatnot, but I gotta admit, sometimes I need a break from that stuff and instead spend some time splashing around in the spooky end of the pool. So I thought I’d take a look at another film by the fine folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. They began as part of a group of friends who spent the 1980s doing live-action role-playing of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game, and I’m sorry that they’ve taken the archived accounts of those games off their website, because the amount of sheer theatrical inventiveness that went into some of those games, given the time period and resources available to them, is really impressive.

So two of them went on to found the HPLHS, and they do their primary business in the production of era-appropriate props for role-playing groups, while also working in the film and theater industries in Los Angeles. They’d done radio plays, but in the early 2000s, they produced their first feature-length film, a silent-film adaptation of Call of Cthulhu. It had its weaknesses, as I observed in my write-up, but there’s something I found really appealing about how they approached the material in a way that was budget-effective and made sense narratively. For the time when the original short story was published, if it had been adapted into a film, it would have been a silent film, so in a sense it was like a discovered artifact, a piece of entertainment from a bygone era, telling a story from that era. And it was largely evocative - maybe not as viscerally scary as a modern horror film, but you could appreciate how audiences in the 1920s would have freaked out at what was up on the screen. And for that matter, the genuine affection for the source material really shone through, so it was clear that this film - made on a shoestring budget, filming in backyards and actor’s houses, everyone pulling double and triple duty - was absolutely a labor of love. That’s not something you see a lot of in horror films, and I think it’s important to preserve it.

So it was with all of this in mind that I went into their second full-length effort, an adaptation of The Whisperer In Darkness. It’s a much more ambitious endeavor than the first film, and it has many of that films’ strengths, but also some of its weaknesses as well.

It’s the story of Albert Wilmarth, a folklorist who’s just come into possession of a very rare text - the original annotated manuscript of a long-unobtainable book about myths and legends specific to rural Vermont. Legends about the mysterious creatures that have been living in its hills and caves since long before the land was settled. Wilmarth is, of course, a committed skeptic - these are tales, not truth, and he has an academic’s interest in them, not a believer’s. But he’s also been in correspondence with a resident of the area, Henry Akeley, who insists that the creatures are very real, and he has evidence to prove it. Armed with this manuscript, Wilmarth intends to pay Akeley a visit.

Meanwhile, Vermont’s been experiencing the worst flooding it’s had in years. And things are washing up as the water recedes. Strange things, with an unrecognizable biology.

Just as their first film was done in the style of a 1920s silent film, contemporaneous to the story’s publication, this film is likewise done in the style of early talking films from the early 1930s, when this story was originally published as well. The move from silent to talking films adds a layer of complexity - now they have to actually manage dialogue and sound design along with everything else - as well as the need to flesh out a short story into a feature-length film. I give them a lot of credit here - this is a much more ambitious outing than their first film on pretty much every front, and mostly they pull it off with aplomb. The cinematic details, like title and credit presentation, are period-accurate, as is the camerawork (no drone shots here), dialogue, wardrobe, set design, and most importantly, the acting. There’s a certain mannered delivery to the way people talked in early talking motion pictures - I don’t know exactly why, (I wonder how much of it was a transition from theater and the need for precise elocution, along with broad affectation as a way to establish character) but whatever the case may be, there’s a certain rhythm and melody to how people talk that you don’t hear in modern films. If it hadn’t been present here, the game would have been up immediately. So - some technical details aside - this looks and sounds like a 1930s talking picture, which is essential to creating the feeling the film strives for.

It’s also a story about strange creatures from beyond the blackness of space, as Lovecraft’s stories tended to be, and so this meant a fair amount of effects work. A lot of that is pretty period-accurate too - lots of in-camera and practical effects work, though they did utilize some digital effects to cheat things that would have been more costly in terms of time and money to achieve in a period-accurate way. For the most part, however, it looks period-accurate, leading to the irony that digital effects are being used to emulate early stop-motion. But the upshot is that with a few exceptions, nothing looks too slick or clean to be something from a 1930s film. All of this is important because a film like this is going to work if it draws the viewer into its world - you aren’t just watching a movie about one man’s discovery of horrors from beyond space, you’re watching a movie about those things made in a very specific place and time, so you’re responding not just to the story, but to its time as well. It’s the same reason that filmmakers who attempt to emulate the 1970s-era “grindhouse” style of exploitation film use specific film stocks and editing choices and soundtracks and title cards. Referencing a period-specific set of aesthetics adds an emotional component on top of what’s already there.

So the upside is that for the most part, the filmmakers have made something that looks like it came out of a vault somewhere, as if we’re watching another film adaptation that audiences in the 1930s would have watched, and given that Lovecraft’s work wasn’t getting the film treatment when he was still alive, there’s a really interesting feeling to that, like we’re privy to entertainment from a parallel universe. There are some downsides, however. First, this film doesn’t quite have the emotional intensity of the earlier film - silent films were theatrical by nature, with no dialogue, so the music and the actors’ performance had to sell the whole thing. This made that film much more melodramatic, and thus, more intense. The performances are more subdued here, as befits a talking film, but as a result it loses some of that intensity. It’s a lot of polite, civilized people talking in a polite, civilized way, which is again totally period-appropriate, but it loses some tension as a result.

The second problem is that the pacing is an issue. There’s a nice sense almost from the start that all is not right here, even if you are - like me - familiar with the original story and have an idea of how it’s going to play out. But the last act feels padded with long stretches of expository dialogue, so when it feels like things should be speeding up and getting more tense, they slow down instead and there’s more air between the tense moments than there should be. The epistolary nature of the first film’s story made it a little easier to open things up. but here, there’s a more linear story in play and so it’s much more apparent when things are being stretched out. They made the choice to add new story elements onto the third act, and I understand their reasoning for doing so (mostly fleshing out the main characters a little more and making the end less perfunctory), but it seems to me that if they’d leaned more into the original version of the story, where there’s much more lead-up to Wilmarth’s trip to Vermont and less time actually spent there, making the end more of a rush of revelation after a slow burn, that might have been a more effective way of telling the story in terms of creating and sustaining tension and dread.

There are some technical issues as well, ones shared with their first film. Overall it’s an achievement - it’s tough to emulate a bygone style of filmmaking, and in so many ways they get it right, but the end product looks a little too clean, it’s a little too apparent that this wasn’t actually shot on 1930s film stock and recorded using period-appropriate technology. It’s too clean to be even the best restoration as well, so the conceit doesn’t always hold (there’s one special effect where it’s especially apparent they used green-screen, and it pulls you out of the story some). There are sequences which could have been accomplished in the 1930s through other means and would have been incredibly ambitious for the time, and I’m usually not one for artificially aging films (it’s so easy to go overboard), but I think in the case of this film and their previous work, some post-production dirtying-up would be to their benefit. There was also one monster design choice that didn’t quite land for me, reminding me less of horrors from beyond space and more of characters from an old Flash Gordon serial, which hurt the ending a little too. Then again, for everything that didn’t quite land, there were multiple things that did, but as is so often the case, when it doesn’t work it leaps right out at me as a result.

Like the first film, the result is more a film that you appreciate than one you get swallowed up by, there’s always a little bit of distance there, though I think this would be true of a number of films made during that time period. Still, the Society’s motto is “ludo fore putavimus,” which they translate from the Latin as “we thought it would be fun,” and it’s clear how much fun everyone had making this film. There’s something to be said for that when so many films are marketed and focus-grouped until all the life is sucked out of them. Even if it didn’t really scare me as much as it could have, I’m impressed at how they’ve pushed themselves and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

IMDB entry
HPLHS webstore
Available on Amazon  

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Ich Seh Ich Seh: Not Everything Is What It Seems, But You Kind Of Already Know That

The trick to a good mystery is keeping information back from the audience until just the right time. I mean, the clue’s in the name - mysteries require keeping things mysterious, so that the reveal is meaningful and affects the audience’s understanding and experience of the story. If, in a scary movie, you’re trying to create an atmosphere of unease, or paranoia, or a sense that there’s something wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it, then withholding information in order to reveal it at a dramatic moment is a really solid way to do that.

But it requires that you not give things away too soon, which is where Ich Seh Ich Seh (I See I See, released in the U.S. as Goodnight Mommy) drops the ball. It’s slow-paced, unsettling, and atmospheric for a good part of its runtime, but there’s a lot less mystery there than it thinks, and the film suffers as a result.

We open on a lazy summer day in the Austrian countryside, where brothers Lukas and Elias are playing hide-and-seek in a cornfield. It seems like one of those days you only have when you’re a little kid, free of all responsibility and content to go where they day takes you. They live in a fancy modern home, far away from the city. It looks like the summer home of someone who doesn’t have to worry about money. And then, at some point, their mother comes home. She’s been in the hospital, having some plastic surgery done, and so she arrives, unrecognizable with her head swathed in bandages. She needs to rest, she needs to avoid the sun, she needs peace and quiet and to be left alone.

She isn’t acting like their mother at all.

So almost from the get-go, everything seems slightly…off. The acting in general is a little on the inert side, but it works with the mood that’s established. Their mother seems cold and distant, but especially so when contrasted with a home recording that Elias plays, of her singing them a lullaby and telling them how much she loves them. For some reason, she won’ t speak to Lukas directly, as if he’s done something unforgivable. She doesn’t even want to acknowledge him, and when Elias asks why she won’t, she just says “you know why.” It feels harsh, and vindictive. She’s hard to connect with. Late at night, she goes out into the woods, takes off all the bandages, and screams. It’s just the three of them, out in the country, and the emptiness surrounding them is tangible, expressed through lots of long, static shots of empty rooms and surrounding countryside with no other people to be seen. There are all kinds of odd touches - first, her presence, face mostly obscured, evokes films like Eyes Without A Face and Hellraiser 2, so her just standing there is kind of unnerving. For some reason Lukas and Elias collect hissing cockroaches in a big terrarium. Blinds keep getting raised and lowered, the boys sneak around the house so they don’t disturb their mother, and she gets disturbed very easily, by all kinds of things. The vibe is very sinister, without clearly pointing to a specific outcome. Even little things seem faintly wrong.

At least, that’s how it starts, going by slowly as one day becomes another and the boys wonder what happened to their mother, with a constant undercurrent of unease. But then about 20 minutes in, a major plot point gets revealed. It’s not the filmmakers telling us outright, they’re not revealing the big twist in the first act like some other movies do. No, it’s just something we aren’t supposed to be aware of quite yet, but the way scenes are staged and the way some dialogue is written, it inadvertently gives the game away, and the film deflates as a result, because it turns what should be a startling revelation that recontextualizes everything that went before into a foregone conclusion. We stop trying to figure out what the fuck is going on well before the end of the first act, and so it ends up being an hour or so of knowing exactly what is going on and just sort of waiting to see how it turns out. This was also a problem with the filmmakers’ later film The Lodge, which shares a lot of thematic and character beats with this film, remixed and relocated, but very much a variation on a theme. In that film, information that would have had a real impact if it had been held back until the end of the first or even second act is explicitly revealed in the first 10 minutes or so, and it sucks a lot of the air out of the room. In both cases, a revelation is supposed to be just that, a revelation, but instead just ends up being affirmation of something that anyone paying attention to the film has already figured out well before the other shoe drops. Here it doesn’t feel like a conscious choice, like it is in The Lodge (and clumsily handled, at that), but the effect is the same.

And then, on top of that, it shifts in the third act to something much darker, nastier, and violent than the first two-thirds of the film. It makes sense narratively, but tonally it’s really jarring. You’ve settled in expecting diffuse creepiness, nefarious goings-on, a world slightly out of kilter, and then out of nowhere it turns absolutely brutal. By this point the outlines of the situation are completely spelled out and in terms of what’s really going on, there are no surprises left. And in some ways, that makes the third act even more grueling, knowing the reality of the situation and what’s likely to come, and indeed it ends with a bleakness that is almost punishing. Maybe the filmmakers did us a favor by tipping their hand early, because all of it crashing down at once might just be too much. But somehow I think what really happened was that they just thought they were being more subtle than they actually were, and the big revelation isn’t a big revelation because we’ve known for most of the movie and we’re just waiting for it to end. The result is something that manages to be anticlimactic and shocking at the same time, and it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon