I liked this alien abduction movie a lot, glad I found this happy surprise. A suburban family’s life gets turned inside out when their youngest son starts having nightmares of “The Sandman” visiting him. Then the weird things around the house start happening. Smart direction with great escalation of weirdness into panic inducing events to a great finale. Really liked the cast, Keri Russell is the stand out as usual. Perfect spooky PG-13 alien flick.
I’m a fan of the V/H/S series, I’ve written reviews for the first two movies. The stories in the first two movies range from good to high fives all around awesome. I have no idea WTF happened with this one (OK, I have some ideas). The found footage angle made things way too complicated for the filmmakers of Viral to handle. Very little works the way they wanted it to. The main piece that “stitches” the other stories into the movie is a departure for the series and is a complete waste. It makes little sense and is boring (it’s where “Viral” fits into the title). The non-stop artificial artifacting and tape distortion is incredibly irritating. All the short stories completely miss the mark. None of them come close to being scary or suspenseful. The magician story is an interesting idea but I think it would work better if it was used for a novella collection like Stephen King’s Four Past Midnight. It just doesn’t fit what the V/H/S is supposed to do. The alternate dimension door story is ruined by a god awful hand puppet. The skater story has some neat looking skeleton guys sometimes. I think that can count as praise. Besides that, it’s stupid and edited so bad it’s unwatchable. They all look super cheap with terrible CG effects. A merciful 80 minutes long is the only highlight of this pile of disappointment.
It’s taken me awhile to get this horror classic. As with any movie from the 60’s (and each decade really) it shows off a standard of filmmaking this simply isn’t done today. It’s much slower in every regard. Long(er) opening credits, the first act takes a while to spool up and the editing is much slower and deliberate. You’re eased into the movie and left to digest each scene. Once you get it down, the next bit comes at you. So, Rosemary and her husband Guy move into a nice apartment in NYC where their neighbors are a bit eccentric. Things progress slowly and rather uneventfully until Rosemary and Guy decide to start a family. The night they have planned for themselves, Rosemary falls ill, has a super messed up dream and in the morning finds out that her husband decided to go for it despite her being passed out. A red flag if there ever was one. Mia Farrow as Rosemary is far and away the best part of the movie. She holds the whole movie together and is a hell of a leading actress. I can see how this was scary 50 years ago, but today just about all of that is lost. It’s very dated and doesn’t stand up to the likes of The Exorcist (released 6 years later). At 135 minutes, it takes forever to really get going. I get setting things up and this is really from the perspective of someone used to more modern filmmaking (the last 30 years or so), but good lord does this movie draw things out. I think you could easily cut out 15 minutes and not miss a thing. While the beginning makes you suspicious of some people, it isn’t until that crazy night that the movie actually gets engaging. Her getting sick and being told what to do is disturbing and then the growing paranoia (which is also drawn out) as she puts things together add the next much-needed layer. Things really come together in the last 25 minutes or so. I think you can watch Rosemary’s Baby and appreciate it significant a piece of movie history, but it’ll bore the vast majority of people today. It just didn’t age well.