hampersnow-41369

The best part of Grafted is the opening sequence which is genuinely horrifying with excellent special effects. Unfortunately it never lives up to that scene. This movie had 4 or 5 writers and you would think they could assemble something that was original , at least entertaining or even made sense. How many Mean girl movies do we need ? Writers keep recycling the same old themes and using the same tired stereotypes and clichés to populate movies and now it's just boring. The entire midsection of this movie is the same old nonsense about catty females that's been done hundreds of times before. Eventually it doesn't even make sense , as if the writers just decided to throw any flimsy idea into the script. There are huge holes in the plot and the stupidity of it all became tedious and boring. I know this is being touted as Body Horror, but David Cronenberg knows how to make excellent body horror and even a recent film like Substance was not only outstanding but had a great message. This was just a mess.

I was surprised to read this was released as a feature film because while well done, photographed beautifully, with obvious money spent on recreating the period, this just felt like a made for TV movie. The performance by Cailee Spaeny is fine, it's a movie about Priscilla after all not Elvis, but Elordi is dreadful as Elvis. I could only understand about half of his dialogue in the movie. While we see their relationship beginning and the ultimate end, my biggest problem with the movie is that it's 90% a lead up their eventual wedding and very little of their marriage. When she leaves, I had no idea why. Marriage, baby, and all of a sudden the movie's ending. There is so much detail in most of this movie concerning their life before they were married, much of it that added nothing, and then the movie is quickly wrapped up with no detail at all. If this had been a 2 part mini-series it might have made sense as Part 1, but instead it felt like a huge section of her life were cut out of the film. I haven't read Priscilla's book, maybe this is true to the book's format, but her character was interesting enough that I would like to have understood what the actual marriage was like. It's worth a one time watch but I have a feeling the book was better.

There isn't much to Banshee Chapter which is probably it's biggest negative because other wise it's a well done horror film that is very well acted by Katia Winter and Ted Levine, in fact Levine is excellent which adds to the realism of the film. There are plenty of scares and genuine suspense although at times it seems as if the film were just a series of scenes set up to bring you to the next scare. The movie wasn't confusing but the ending kind of was. Overall it's not boring and is one of the few films that at close to 90 minutes just flew by. I wish there had been more to the story, maybe the budget wouldn't allow it, but this had the potential to become a classic horror and in the end just doesn't. Worth a watch for horror/sci-fi fans.