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I see a lot in the reviews and even the trivia section on IMDB that there was a clear bit of influence and toying with "Lord of the Flies" in this film, whether intentional or not. This is not a fair comparison due to what should be the most obvious thing: This is not a wild uncontrolled jungle these kids are stranded in.

"Lord of the Flies" was about a group of kids who get stranded on a deserted island and attempt to build a structured society. The inevitably breakdown and failure is supposedly indicative of the chaotic nature of humanity, particularly when everyone involved is underdeveloped and not yet mature enough to fully master the necessities of socialization and communication to properly hold a tribe of people together.

"Voyagers" is about a spaceship full of children and one adult meant to take an 86 year journey to a new life-habitable planet. The children are meant to grow up, have their own children, and those children have their own children who will be the ones to arrive and set up a colony on the new planet.

Once the one adult in the story is taken out of the situation, it unfolds like Lord of the Flies.

Except that this is not a deserted island, this is not the wilderness. This is supposedly humanity's last chance for survival, a desperate mission sent to seed a distant planet while everyone back on Earth dies off.

So why is the ship packed with children who do not have parents, are kept constantly drugged so they experience no strong emotions or hormonal instincts, and not properly socialized or taught anything by their one adult except how to maintain the ship and feed themselves?

This is a catastrophe that anyone should've been able to see and take measures to prevent long before these kids were even test tube grown. The story and the acting and the writing is not strong or interesting enough to get past the incredible stupidity of the situation as a whole.

Grown-ass adults supposedly put this mission together and sent the kids into space on a mission that if it fails, means the end of the human race and they didn't think to send anyone else on the mission to raise the kids properly, watch over them, and prepare them for the next stage of the mission. The one adult who tags along literally had to beg to go along at the last moment because apparently he was the only one not so incredibly stupid as to realize that sending a spaceship full of unsocialized kids in the midst of puberty with an automated system to teach them to feed and drug themselves was a disaster waiting to happen.

I can't with this movie, I can't focus on anything else except how incredibly stupid this whole thing was. This is like if in "Interstellar" instead of sending Cooper the engineer and the elite astronauts, they sent his daughter and some other kids alone instead.

Went into this film without knowing anything about it. Apparently Madison, born Emily, had an abusive husband and now she lives on her own. She had a history of being in a psych ward where a voice called Gabriel spoke through a radio to her and now she's having scary dreams/visions of gruesome murders.

For too long this film drags, taking too long to actually get to the main point here. It follows the typical horror thriller tropes, almost as a dull routine to build up to the horror properly which it so desperately wants to get to.

The problem is the amount of time wasted in the buildup, with background exposition, means that by the time the big James Wan-style twist, I've already figured it out.

Too much time was spent giving clues that could only really lead to a few places, so it was inevitable that the big twist would've been figured out long ahead of time.

From there, the film goes extra weird, and a little too dumb for its own good. There's plenty of grotesque over the top gore, though it also comes with.... wacky over the top martial arts-style fight scenes, a normal human body that is inexplicably bulletproof, and the main antagonist somehow having magic electronics-disrupting powers.

Some of the stuff I strongly disliked, but I don't hold it against the film if it's done well or has a purpose to the story. I also tend to prefer things not be explained too much in a film, so the aforementioned mysterious electronics-disrupting powers not being explained didn't bother me.

What bothered me most about this film is that it had a dumb little idea they wanted to do, and so constructed a very bland and boring story around it just to build up to the wacky climax.

If you don't like how the story turns out, that's fine, but if you did like it, then this could've been done so much better, like a fine cut of perfectly seasoned and cooked steak served with soggy french fries and mushy salad.

I was an avid Nickelodeon watcher as a child, and very well acquainted with Good Burger, the film and the sketches, as well as Kenan and Kel with their own spinoff show.

Then I grew up and grew out of Nickelodeon. But now almost 30 years later comes a sequel. Standard reflex for such news and things is to automatically assume it will suck and is a cheap nostalgia cash-grab.

It's not. It's fine. Some actual effort into many aspects of this; for one, Dexter's attitude towards Ed has clearly changed since the first film, as he's a lot more tolerant of his wacky antics, but in a realistic way, not in a "ignoring the crazy guy now" way.

A lot of the humor is broad and slapstick, obvious for a movie essentially meant for children (although at one point someone says "ass").

What surprised me was that there were actual genuinely funny jokes and gags that worked even on adults. A lot more than I expected.

I'm not one who is taken in by nostalgia alone, and it has its share of flaws, so the highest praise can give this movie is if I had to watch it again, I would not mind it.

This film strongly reminded me of "Primer", but in terms of the scifi involved it is much softer than Primer. Primer was extremely dense and focused a lot on the engineering aspect as well as sticking to the "rules" of time travel as much as possible.

Here, the kids involved do go into some engineering but it is largely glossed over and once dumb things like "emotions" and "hormones" get involved, the rules start getting broken.

I wasn't expecting something on the level of "Primer" and that's okay. It was fun and the characters were fun, narrowly avoiding becoming annoying on several occasions.

The consistency in terms of the time travel logic was not clearly evident on first viewing, which is a bit weird since almost every time travel movie basically has a different "type" of time travel that it follows all throughout (such as, changing past = changing future, or cannot change past because what you try to change was already done in the first place, or changing time = creating alternate universe).

Maybe it would require another viewing to get it, but for the most part this film is too light and breezy for that. It doesn't really matter how the time travel works in this film. It might have made for some more interesting elements if it did but ultimately I cannot fault this film for the decisions made and stuck with.

Oh man. Good god. That was my reaction several times throughout this film, and not in a good way.

Within the first minute I was already dreading it, as the opening narration mentioned some generic ruling star empire where "a thousand kings ruled uninterrupted", which is a lot like a chain-smoking fat man with a drinking problem saying he's going to live to be 150. Or maybe it's just being cheeky and there were actually hundreds of kings ruling over the course of a couple of years, being constantly deposed or assassinated every few days.

This bothered me because this felt like a lazy foundation from which to start a whole new science fiction universe, and my feeling was correct.

This movie spends its first hour just on worldbuilding, except that the world it's building is bland and boring. This could easily be transplanted into Star Wars or Warhammer or any other major franchise and almost nothing would have to be changed. And this isn't in a good "timeless classic" way like the story of Seven Samurai (an obvious inspiration) is.

Instead it's because the story's setting is so empty it's like a blank scifi RPG template was picked and Zack Snyder never actually bothered to fill out any of the details.

There's tons of comparisons made by reviewers to Star Wars, and the knowledge that apparently this was originally meant to be a Star Wars film that Disney passed on (a rare Disney W). Any resemblance to Star Wars is purely superficial; there's almost nothing here.

The original "Star Wars" had a similar initial setup of a big evil empire and a plucky band of rebels building up a resistance against them. As well, it had many different things and people happening around it, references made to things, people, and events that clearly were important to the world we were seeing, like Obi-Wan, the Clone Wars, the Jedi being defenders of the Republic, the Force, Jabba, the Imperial Senate, all these things were brought up in the very first film and treated with a sense of having some very clear importance to the story as a whole.

There's nothing like that here beyond the absolute bare minimum of words to fill it in. The "Imperium" rules from its "Motherworld". They were ruled by kings, then their last king was assassinated and an evil psychopath named Balisarius took over or something. Now they are cartoonishly evil and they literally rape and murder and destroy entire planets for no clear reason. They raped murdered and destroyed Kora's planet and kidnapped her as a kid to raise her as a soldier for the Imperium until she deserted.

That's it. That's pretty much the entirety of Rebel Moon's world that it took 45 minutes to set up.

Without anything else to it, you'd imagine there would be some interesting characters or wild action scenes to entertain with, but there aren't. Everyone has the same sort of bland flattened affect of an RPG NPC waiting for you to level up enough to unlock their backstory sidequest. Some of them don't even seem to have names until many scenes later when another character mentions their name out loud.

None of the action scenes are in any way memorable or exciting, as at best they could be described as shot "functionally", except apparently Zack Snyder's gimmick is random slow motion, there's constant instances where the action will suddenly go into slow motion for no reason.

The slow motion didn't bother me as much as it apparently does other people. What did bother me was how the camera kept randomly unfocusing during scenes, blurring for no reason, or suddenly going into a sort of fisheye lens appearance, or one shot of Kora and The Farmer Whose Name I Forgot, where suddenly the Farmer's face started to blur while Kora's remained sharp and in focus.

All of this would be laughable if the entire film itself weren't so BORING. Pretty much everyone looks and sounds miserable, even in scenes they're supposed to be feeling triumphant in, and the only actor who seems to be putting any real effort into their work is Ed Skrein, which is somewhat amusing because ten years ago he played Daario Naharis in season 3 of Game of Thrones and then was replaced by Michiel Huisman (also in this film) because supposedly they didn't think his acting skills would've been up to par for what they had planned with Daario later on (which turned out to be mostly nothing).

If you told me this was a film that was written, directed, photographed, and edited all by first timers, I would believe you. It has almost no redeeming features unless you are the kind of person who likes looking at flashing lights and sweaty people, in which case there are plenty of other movies that have that that aren't as BORING as this.

Honestly this movie is not bad at all. It wasn't what I was expecting but I never hold that against a film. The only thing that probably drags the script down is that it struggles a bit in the first half hour or so, moving so slow as to almost be boring.

It isn't until more than an hour in that the film is done playing with the superficially odd element of "Hollywood actress is hanging out with our normal family to learn more about us" and finally starts delving into the real core of the film; the aftermath of what began as a romantic relationship between a teacher in her 30s and a 13 year old student now that they are married with children.

What remaining time is given to this, and to the gradual realization from Joe that his late childhood was basically stolen from him, is what really makes this film fascinating, along with the perpetual presence of Nathalie Portman's character Elizabeth, who is involving herself further and further into the family dynamic to the point where she would seem to be getting too close to them.

But what really drags this film down as a whole is the goofy little piano cue that plays after almost every scene or dramatic moment. It is like something you'd hear in a parody of a soap opera, or in "The Room". It does not fit the tone of the movie at all and is cringeworthy in how goofy it is played.

I thought after some time that this was possibly intentionally goofy in a satirical way, but as the film progresses you start to realize it isn't, they went with this goofy faux-soap opera piano cue. It is so bad I almost stopped watching completely.

This was a surprise when the first season came out in 2021. It was actually good, and got a lot of freedom in terms of gore and saying the F word freely on cable television. It also went the route that "It" (2017) did by having the main cast of kids be the strongest point of the show and make them actually likeable and interesting.

The times it focused on "Chucky" lore sometimes threatened to derail it, while Fiona Dourif is an absolute powerhouse reprising the role of Nica from Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky, as well as even playing 80s era Chucky (with her father Brad Dourif overdubbing her) in flashbacks, and a Nica infested by Chucky.

By the time of season 2, it falls off hard. The storyline starts to become overly wacky and repetitive, and it starts to become cynical and even a bit over the top disgusting with the kills.

Something that made (most of) the Chucky movies great is that they were fun, even with all the violence and gore if you weren't into that. The 2019 reboot "Child's Play" was nothing like that. It was ugly, nasty, unfun, and cruel. It felt less like a fun horror movie and more like someone with serious anger problems taking out their problems on fictional characters.

Seasons 2 and 3 of this show feel somewhat like that. Chucky is still acting snarky and wacky, but the story is collapsing around him. The gore and violence is becoming gross, nasty, and needlessly cruel, and the effect it's having on the main characters starts making you empathize more and more with them while they become more and more miserable, frustrated, angry, and obsessed, all the while Chucky hasn't changed.

In short, Chucky isn't fun anymore. The level of violence is going way up and the level of fun is going way down. If these were the sorts of stories being made by a friend, by the first few episodes of season 3, you would be asking them serious questions about their emotional state.

The very first thing I noticed about this film, watching about 10-15 minutes worth, above all else, was "Wow this is unreasonably loud". Not just in terms of volume or the constant screams, but just the overall tone of the film. If this is intended to be a horror movie, it is doing absolutely everything wrong thematically; there's tons of music constantly playing, tons of sound effects making tons of noise, acting that sometimes borders on over the top and wacky, and people talking loudly all the time.

The way it comes across as a result is almost like a stereotypical "hollywood popcorn flick" more suited for an action movie or a comedy. There's even a sequence about 1 hour and 10 minutes in that is shot and scored like something from "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or "Van Hellsing". There's even a goofy little one-person dancing sequence during these events.

Except this movie isn't an action film. It doesn't try to be. It's not funny either, and it doesn't try to be a comedy. It's supposed to be a horror film, but it doesn't seem to be trying. Nothing in it is scary, there's an overabundance of (extremely noisy) jumpscares, the CG is atrocious, and overall it's extremely boring.

What was the plan here? This film has nothing to offer for fans of pretty much any genre other than extreme closeups of Alison Lohman's face and her constantly screaming. If I wanted that I don't need to be subjected to this wall of noise, both visually and audially.

That's really saying something, I think. I consider V/H/S Viral to be the worst of the series, but at the very least "Viral" had some mildly amusing bits like the nonchalant zombie fight with the skateboarders.

I greatly enjoyed the first V/H/S, thought the sequel was overproduced and boring, Viral a disaster. Then the series revived on Shudder. V/H/S 94 I found to be a big letdown, while V/H/S 99 was surprisingly fun.

One of my biggest complaints about V/H/S 94 was that a whole lot of the segments seemed largely pointless or meandering and didn't really offer anything except cheap and excessive gore for gore's sake, which bores me.

But at least they were clearly having fun with it.

V/H/S 85 seems to backslide to the pointless and meandering, with stories that are largely boring and just setups to have gore for gore's sake. None of them have any goofy or tongue-in-cheek elements like 94 or 99 or any hint of humor to them.

Originally I had no interest in the V/H/S series because I was under the impression it was going to be a cheap, trashy gorefest of fake snuff films, less a film anthology than a makeup/practical effects artist's thesis project. I was pleasantly surprised (most of the time) when the segments turned out to be mostly fun, exciting, or at least imaginative in some ways.

This is the film in the series (so far) that is a cheap, trashy gorefest of fake snuff films with the slighest of slight supernatural bends to each segment just to make it fit in with the series. Boring.

Extremely boring and extremely plain, bland, formulaic. This is a movie that could have been made at any point in time by any writer and any director. There's no style to it, no substance, nothing in it beyond the ordinary. Everything about it screams "Paycheck movie", done by a handful of well known actors for a paycheck and/or a contractual obligation. Hours after viewing I could not even tell you anything significant about the film other than "some cop and a hipster priest deal with demon possessed criminals".

Nothing else stood out about it. Writing, acting, cinematography, music, all very plain and very functional.

I was genuinely shocked when the first V/H/S exceeded my low expectations, then slightly less shocked when the next two in the series proceeded to be terrible. V/H/S 94 despite all the grand fanfare and sort of being a handoff to a new group of filmmakers, was a meandering mess more focused on gore for gore's sake than anything else.

This one is far superior, possibly as good as the original. For one, while the attempt to make the video look like VHS quality (begun in V/H/S 94) isn't fully convincing, the overall style and ambience of the segments, even when they go over the top into parody, are much more convincing as something from the 90s than most any of the previous entries in the series.

Some moments seem to venture a bit too close to being overly cheesy or ridiculous, but these moments never last long enough to drag from the film overall. Also, the use of gore works far better than in V/H/S 94, without it becoming over the top or boringly excessive like a simulated snuff film.

At the very least it was better than V/H/S Viral and V/H/S 2. On the positive side for this, an effort was made to make the video actually look like it was filmed by hand camera and being viewed on VHS. The effect was still too smooth in some places and the frame rate was off, but it still looked significantly better than the last few.

The segments themselves just weren't very good overall. There was also a lot more effort and attention placed into the gore effects than on actual story or horror.

The experience reminded me of how I had avoided watching the original V/H/S for so many years because I was worried it wasn't actually a horror anthology so much as simulated snuff films. Finally watching V/H/S I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. Watching V/H/S 94 it feels more like most of this was put together just to be simulated snuff films.

I'm a sucker for found footage stuff and typically I do not hold certain low budget elements against a film such as bad acting or mediocre effects or props. This film doesn't have that issue. It's biggest issue is that it's painfully cliche.

From the pointless interrogation tape of Mr. Creep to the clearly deranged old lady with the serial killer obsession you can't help but cringe or go "Oh come on" constantly at every dumb little sequence that has either been done so many times before in better movies or relies too much on the characters being incredibly stupid, it's as if they live in an alternate universe where they've never seen any movies, read any books, or learned anything at all about things like "stranger danger".

Just as I (almost) got over how they killed the dog in V/H/S 2, this idiotic entry has them kill another dog. 0 stars.

Even aside from that, this is the franchise-killer sequel. It's not even remotely surprising that the sequels that follow (which I haven't seen yet) ended up taking 7-8 years to be made and have actual years attached to them so that they actually fit into the VHS aesthetic that the first film was clearly going for.

This entry is a completely incoherent mess. While the first two films had a main story framing device (people find a cache of mysterious VHS tapes with horror stuff on it), this one has no framing device. The main story involves a guy filming his girlfriend on his smartphone. Then there's a police chase nearby he wants to catch a part of to go viral. The existence of smartphones and virality means we've just completely abandoned the entire VHS concept as a whole.

From there, weird vaguely supernatural stuff happens in that story. At the same time, completely unrelated and disconnected from it, we get interruptions of other little film segments, all of them seeming to have the same vague theme of "going viral" in one way or another.

And not only do none of these feature VHS filming (other than a character finding a cache of VHS tapes with horror stuff on it), but despite that, they have a constant, nonstop electrical disturbance and glitchy static-y effects on screen to simulate a badly warped VHS tape, despite the fact that none of the segments are being filmed on VHS or on any analog format of any kind.

Really, a whole lot of these features feel a lot like they are falling victim to the same thing they are trying to mock with each one; the desperate need to "go viral" with their 15 minutes of fame. The segments are increasingly incoherent, pointlessly gorey in a way that is less "ew awesome!" and more "cram as much shredded meat and red syrup on screen as possible".

I'm not overly sensitive to gore or slashy type films. I don't particularly like them but I don't go out of my way to hate on them just because (I actually liked the first V/H/S). This film is just miserable and it sucks, whether it was rated PG-13 and sanitized or Unrated with gaping sucking wounds given HD closeups, it just sucks.

Usually it takes a few entries in a franchise before it starts going off the rails. V/H/S manages it in just one. For starters, the whole concept of VHS tapes seems to completely go out the window as most of these segments are not filmed on VHS tapes and have no reason to be transferred to VHS tapes. As well, the presence of certain modern-era cell phones means that the time period they're taking place in would be long after the end of VHS.

Not just a case of "VHS got old and people stopped using it" but almost all major companies that made blank VHS tapes had stopped by the time even the earliest of smartphones were starting to come out.

But even leaving that aside, these entries just aren't good at all. As well, the insane number of different camera angles and cuts means that each one had to have multiple people filming, all their camera footage collected, and edited together by someone onto a VHS tape of all formats.

Also, they killed the dog in one segment. 0 stars.

I'd been avoiding this film for about as long as it's been out, largely because something about the descriptions made it seem like it was basically a collection of snuff tapes, maybe with a weak attempt at some manner of psychological story like "The Poughkeepsie Tapes".

I was almost pleasantly surprised to see that it doesn't go for that and instead adds distinctly supernatural elements to each segment viewed via the tape. Most of the segments were fun.

Some effort was made to make sure that the film actually looks like VHS video. At times the picture quality abruptly becomes HD quality, making it unclear if this is supposed to be part of what is being filmed or a shifting to "God's Eye View" in between the framing device.

This is certainly worth a watch though it's not necessarily something I'd consider a cult classic, not unless the sequels managed to keep up the same string of generally good quality.

My initial thought about this was that it was an ill-advised sequel/spinoff to "The Big Lebowski", starring a character that was explicitly stated to be a pederast. Making a film with a pederast as the protagonist seems like a bad idea.

However this film opens up very quickly with a scene basically trying to retcon that as a mistake, with him somehow being wrongfully convicted based on a little boy in the bathroom commenting on his penis while they're both urinating in urinals.

But whatever, the film moves on, and it's very clearly not trying to be another The Big Lebowski, which is probably a good thing. Unfortunately it's apparently trying to be a comedy, and it just doesn't work out that way.

Instead it comes across rather unpleasant, bordering between oafish and sleazy in a rascally way, and just disturbing. After the credits it's shown this is based on a novel, so it was clearly a different story that had a Big Lebowski minor character shoehorned in for the extra publicity it would otherwise never have gotten.

Maybe that was the right move, as there was no way I would have bothered watching this otherwise. Whether this was a faithful adaptation of the novel or not, it was just not very good.

By year, this movie came first (2009) but throughout most of the second half I could not help but think that the movie "Coherence" (2013) did this same thing and did it better.

Almost sensing that, the streaming service I watched it from (Tubi) immediately suggested "Coherence" to play next.

But it's unfair to judge a movie based on "some other movie did it better". As such I'll only say that of the two, "Coherence" handled the subject matter a bit more solidly and believably.

The main things going against this film are the acting and the overall look. Almost every scene feels like it's lit like the outdoor scenes in "Transformers", it makes the film ugly to look at. The acting also slacks at time, and gives the film a very low budget feel at times that could've been avoided otherwise.

Otherwise it's a bit of a fun enough film, though it sometimes takes too long with some of its ideas, effectively giving the audience too much time to figure things out on their own while the movie keeps taking its time.

This is a film which shows some very clear inspiration from "The Game" Michael Douglas film. Except apparently only in execution.

An attempt is made to tie in the whole alternate reality game type situation with... something?

Is it a satire on upper-class "white collar" cults? Multi-level marketing scams? Modern conceptions of masculinity without actually delving into gender?

I don't know. I'm not sure the film itself even knows. It throws a whole lot of things out there, sometimes managing to hook with a compelling idea or theme, but then it just moves on to something else, often degenerating from varying levels of self-help jargonizing to flagrant criminality. Not even "spend a night in jail, get bailed out, attend some court dates" criminality, but, as Office Space put it, Federal Pounding-In-The-A*s Prison criminality.

What does it amount to? What becomes of any of this? The end credits is accompanied by a whole faux-testimonial video for "Rebirth", droning on and on and trying to pile on the "unsettling creepiness".

But for what? I don't know. If there was something they were trying to say about something, they said a whole lot of stuff, but nothing about anything in particular. If they had nothing to say and just wanted to make something like The Game but "more hardcore", then I guess they made that, but then all they made is something to remind you of The Game.

There's been a sort of backlash against true crime sensationalism lately, to the sort of degree where there's been an intentional shift towards a focus on the victims of crime rather than the criminals or police. Though even that has gradually started to see this leading to exploitation.

This documentary goes a very odd route by seemingly avoiding the victim to a large degree. Lucie Blackman's disappearance is the driving force here, but from the very start we are essentially following the police and their investigation. We don't know who Lucie Blackman is, what she was doing before she disappeared, who she knew, anything that a typical documentary would, setting up the person, brief backstory, then their disappearance and then the investigation.

Instead we jump straight into the investigation. At the same time, focus is being given to Lucie's father who apparently has to harangue the police into actually investigating this as a crime.

Even from there there's not much actually going on in terms of a narrative here around Lucie Blackman. We're shown her father railing against the cops and their apparent ineptitude but we never actually see or hear how they are mishandling the case at first.

Once the cops start down the case, leads are picked up on and followed but we aren't very clear in terms of how said leads were picked up on and how they even relate to the Blackman case, possibly in large part because we skipped over the basic facts of the case and started the documentary with her already missing and without ever really looking back into the "who what where why how" of her actual disappearance.

This is a documentary, so it's supposed to be informative first, with the entertainment aspect being a sort of uncomfortable pushed-aside element that is implied but never made obvious.

Because of this, it's hard to review a documentary, since critiquing it for being boring or otherwise not entertaining is kind of missing the point and a lot like critiquing the news for constantly moving on to new topics of reporting and discussion.

As a result, my problem with this documentary isn't with the entertainment but with the information given. Namely, we aren't given a lot of information. As mentioned, they start off 3 days after the disappearance, and don't give us the starting facts that almost every missing persons case starts with. As well, when we're being told about certain things, we aren't actually shown enough information that would support what is being shown.

As an example, at one point we are told about a trial and the results of a trial. However we are not given any information as to why the result of the trial ended up how it went, particularly considering that we went along with the discovery of the key bits of evidence with the police. Why did this happen? Why did it fail? From just this documentary alone, we don't know.

I caught right at the start the opening credits mentioning Calabria, and realized this was basically an Italian movie. I was concerned because the listing said English, which worried me that I would be watching a badly dubbed version, but in retrospect that probably would've been preferable.

This is a film set in America, and almost none of the main characters has an accent that could discernably be called American. This is not a problem since America is a land of many people except that the main character is described as having been born and raised in America, in Missouri, and has a Scandinavian accent thick enough to have a speaking role in "The Last Kingdom" or "Vikings".

It's all mildly amusing but it's not the reason this movie is so bad. That falls almost entirely on the writing and the overall acting.

Firstly, the depiction of EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon is absolutely cartoonish. The incredible crystal clear audio clarity with which these ghostly voices are picked up makes it as though people would be unable to record anything anywhere because they'd be constantly picking up ghosts talking over everything else.

A whole lot of things depicted here are very cartoonish in how they come across, which speaks a lot to either a gross misunderstanding of the subject matter, a severe lack of research, or a very bad writer.

There's constant little things that break what little immersion this film has. The way a whole lot of the dialogue and behavior comes across feels like it was written by someone who has never gone outside and experienced the real world. It comes across as if written by a child imagining this is what grownups sound and act like.

One of the better comparisons to this sort of dissonance I can make is the example of trying to translate a story using a computer translator rather than a native speaker.

On top of this, the story itself is just a boring mess that seems to be trying to set up something, but never actually gets around to it. Then it goes for a completely incoherent twist ending that feels as though a whole lot of the original idea ended up being cut out and they forgot to update the ending accordingly.

I thought I'd have nothing to say about this film. I bought it for some reason almost 15 years ago and never got around to watching it until now. I was expecting some manner of psychological horror and that's almost what I got for the first ten minutes or so.

As it went on, it started to take on a much goofier, weirder tone, evoking all the sorts of extremely low budget cringe-inducing goofiness of something like "The Room", except that unlike The Room, this film apparently was trying to be funny? At least that's what some of the reviews are strongly suggesting.

There's nothing funny about this movie. The only things even remotely humorous about the film are Udo Kier and the fact that the $10,750 sex doll Kenneth orders looks like it was made out of cloth or papier mâché.

All of which lead to a really ugly ending that put me in a really bad mood and really topped off a dull film with a bad ending just to make it regrettable instead of forgettable.

I just don't know what to say or what went wrong here, because clearly something went wrong in the processing of this film. I missed on the first teasers but apparently they hid the conceit of the film to such a degree that reception was very poor and every subsequent trailer went the "Planet of the Apes trailer" route by revealing that it's actually set on Earth, 65 million years ago, and that humans are apparently the aliens to this world.

But nothing is done with this. There's a character who speaks a different language, and Adam Driver's character goes through a list of possible languages he recognizes to compare it to. Nothing is done with this. Little to no attention is paid to the backstory of the film, which had the potential to be infinitely more interesting when combined with Dinosaur-era Earth compared to what we got instead.

What we got instead is a very plain, very boring "we're here and have to get over there" adventure movie with unconvincing CG dinosaurs occasionally attacking for no real reason and absolutely no sense that our heroes are going to fail or die at any point.

This is the kind of movie that could be transplanted into the middle of the Alaskan wilderness at any time between 1820 and 2020 and any and all script changes to be made could be done in less than 15 minutes. It doesn't have an original story, much less a good story, it doesn't have memorable acting or compelling characters, it doesn't have good CG, it doesn't have anything interesting or notable going on for it.

This is the kind of film that a sleazier film company would cancel release after it was finished in order to pocket the tax write-off. And they would probably be justified.

Rather surprisingly, at least for me, the most interesting and compelling part of this flim were the prisoner/participants. Their interactions and backstories and even brief attempts to piece together some connection between them all and the experiment were all significantly more interesting than the police investigation framing narrative or the goofy doctor.

As for where it starts to come apart is the ending. After apparently proudly setting up little clues throughout the film, it indulges itself in a bit overly long expo-dump basically revealing some shocking and disturbing twist behind the motivation of the experiment, but nothing really regarding the experiment itself.

The problem with this is that the "disturbing twist" was somewhat easily figured out long, long before it unfolded. And given how the ending went, it was seemingly clear that this twist was all they had, and they fumbled it pretty badly.

Without spoiling it, I can only say, as an unrelated but parallel example; when a criminal acts like a weirdo and a freak in front of the police, they are going to attract attention to themselves. And the audience is going to be all over it.

This came as an bonus to the region free Primer blu ray I got.

Literally me watching this film:

"That was a mildly interesting sequence of events establishing mood, but when does the actual story begin?"

Checks playthrough; it's 53 minutes in out of 1 hour 36 minutes total runtime.

This sucks. "Primer" did something similar in terms of setting up a mood and atmosphere without letting the audience in on it easily, but at the very least it gave us something tangible to latch on to and the story eventually allowed for gradual recognition of what was actually happening. Here, it's barely hinted at at any given moment what anything happening means, either thematically or story-wise, and I had to go and read other people's reviews just to figure out what was meant with certain scenes and events, only to discover that even after learning what they meant, they don't actually fit together into a story of any sort.

The synopsis given by the back cover, "A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives".

Best case scenario, that is a bait and switch. Worst case, a flat-out lie. There is a brief, 1 or 2 minute little montage showing the man and woman arguing about certain memories that basically amounts to "No, GuyX wasn't your friend, he was my friend! That event didn't happen to you, it happened to me!"

Nothing else in the film is in any way related to that synopsis in any way.

I think I've seen too many of these indie-type pseudo-pretentious "art films" that I'm no longer even vaguely impressed by the overall atmosphere it goes for. If there is a story here buried under all the incoherent droning wannabe-surrealist scenes, then it's either too deeply buried to make sense of without outside help, or it's just not a good story.