0/10

There is a huge difference between films that are bad and films that don’t try. ‘The Horror’ falls in the ladder. After their parents death, Malcolm and Isabel Rademacher travel to Michigan to take shelter in their family’s lake house for winter. While there, they discover that they aren’t alone and are made to fight for their survival. A fight that will continue long after the violence ends. To even pull that kind of plot out of a film this dull and obscure should award me the Nobel Peace Prize. Someone watching this movie might not even find that much plot in a film of nothing for 76 minutes. For those who don’t know, the film is a low budget suspense flick that is currently making the rounds in independent cinemas across the northeast. It won’t premiere until October of this year, and i hope the lord has mercy on anyone who has to sit through it. If you never listen to my reviews, listen to this one. What makes this film worse than say ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2’, a film i saw two weeks ago? There is nothing of notable positivity. The first problem comes in a title that is so contradictory that it now has me examining every single film title that i go to see for name problems. The movie isn’t even remotely close to a horror movie. If that was the point then where is the suspense? Where is the intrigue? Where is that scene that makes you interested in characters who are so bland and removed from any kind of human emotion that they just sputter in tedious dialogue over and over again? The film starts off with a scene at a bridge telling the local legend of ‘Crybaby Bridge’. I didn’t know this movie had anything to do with that, but i was psyched to see where the legend of such a tale would take me in this film. It’s the only mention of that bridge or anything to do with it. It’s almost like the filmmakers turned on the camera before they actually started shooting and decided to film the cast party. There is nothing even remotely in the direction of plot development. The most exciting scene involved two burglars breaking into the house on the brother and sister, but it’s score is on mute for what should be the most important scene of the film to this point. After that, the movie decides to focus on the psyche of Malcolm and how that night affected his behavior. I’m not sure if i missed some key line of dialogue because the sound editing of the film was by far the worst i have ever seen. I literally sat right in front of a speaker and had trouble figuring out dialogue during the movie. What i could make out reveals that Malcolm has taken a turn for the worst as he spends night after night at the cabin. We are told that the siblings parents died there in a freak accident, but we are never given much else. Did Malcolm murder them? Did the burglars who broke in murder them? How did the accident of the two most important people to our main characters change them? Nothing is ever mentioned in the slightest sense. The finale builds to be this big showdown between brother and sister, but after checking my watch and seeing five minutes left in the run time, i knew i was up for another disappointment. The sister sees the brother laying with blood. Is this his or the therapist of his sister whose house he broke into? We never get answers, as the last scene of the movie cuts back to Malcolm scouting out the Crybaby Bridge with a friend. What did i miss? Was there twenty minutes of film left on the cutting floor that left out some key details? How does any theater get conned into showing this garbage? Unfortunately, questions are the only thing that seem to surround me following a film i deemed as “The worst movie i have ever seen”. I have been through awful films in time, but ‘The Horror’ truly perplexed me on it’s lack of direction alone. I tried as hard as i could to find some kind of positive note about the film, but it’s just not there. After going through everything in my review, maybe the title truly is the one thing that makes sense. ‘The Horror’ will always be that movie cover that gives chills down my spine for that lost 76 minutes on May 2nd, 2015 that i will never get back again.