Honestly!! I'm pretty forgiving of the "slasher" genre and don't expect too much from it. I don't necessarily mind unknown actors who aren't the best, cheesy dialog, plot holes, fake looking blood/violence or terrible music scores. I don't even mind thin plots or lousy character development. But I DO need to see something - ANYTHING - in the movie that makes it worth while. Otherwise, what is the point of watching?
But when a movie comes along trying to be a serious horror flick and it has ALL of the above faults & possibly more, I draw the line. Nothing at all in this movie is good. It has terrible scripting, acting is appalling (apart from the Aussie girl who was actually doing her very best to save this with some OK but not brilliant acting - a futile effort) and the direction is amateurish. It felt like something a first year college student would do for their class project and then get ripped apart by a room full of fellow students as they collapsed in giggles at how bad it was. The "shaky hand-held camera shtick" has been done to death and to be honest was never a clever idea in the first place. But if you're going to use it you MUST know what you're doing and know how to do everything else so well that the shaky camera view doesn't just become irritating, hard to follow and pointless.
Directing and shooting a horror flick takes more than just having your actors run around screaming idiotically while you haphazardly wave a dodgy handy-cam in their general direction and hope you get something interesting actually in the frame. It needs more than some irritating characters who's only real 'character development' is to have them bickering & yelling badly scripted insults across each other, over some trivial lame disagreement during dinner. They need to be interesting characters, the audience need to have something to invest in them, even if it's only because they're sexy/attractive and/or likable and/or funny - which none of these people were. At times it felt as though the cast weren't even given a script but were told to make it up as they go along. That's fine for some shoe- string short film made by amateurs for youtube but it's ridiculous for a movie like this.
It does get better in the second half and I think the reason people are scoring it so highly is all down to the one character and actor who makes this dross just that little bit better. My advice, skip the first half, all you need to know is the family are coming to mum and dad's house for their anniversary and they argue a lot. Then the second half is just fun and mayhem.
I haven't seen the Korean original - I had no idea this was remake when I watched it, but I might track it down just to see what the movie was supposed to be like.
There are many movies out there with the same theme that are done so much better than this. Even the not-so-good ones are more worthy of your time and money.
PS just noticed this is also billed as a "comedy" - Perhaps the whole movie is badly sending itself up and I just missed the point LOL
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