Hidden

Hidden is one of those movies that has a lot of promise, but doesn't deliver like it should.

The movie starts off well, with a well shot sequence of the characters scrambling through the forest. The early movie also does a good job of presenting pieces of information through character dialogue that the viewer has to add together.

Problems occur as the movie progresses. The pacing remains the same throughout the movie rather than picking up towards the movies climax, so the end product feels monotonous. None of the characters are particularly appealing. Elements go unexplained. The effects shots, although practical and done mainly through a variety of camera techniques, are overdone and cartoonish. The movie makes good use of a variety of shots and camera angles, but these are introduced almost immediately, there's nothing kept for the end of the movie to make it stand out. At one point almost all that can be heard is the sound of wind rushing over a microphone which, although it's supposed to add to the drama of the scene, is just distracting.

Hidden is based around a good (although somewhat familiar) idea. The problem is in the execution. The fact that this is the first large-scale production for the director shows.

This is actually a very innovative little production and comprises a solid manifesto of one way to execute an action film. The 'making of' is a gift to filmmakers, particularly the examination of the camera rigs.

Unfortunately all this skill and cleverness wasn't applied to a good story. For all that I liked about it, I couldn't endure the duration of the movie and wound up fast forwarding to the few cool bits, my favourite being the guy scaling the telegraph tower then crawling like a spider across thin air.

Also well worth it just for the extras.

This Film was innovative in it's approach, anyone who knows anything about making films should be impressed with the quality of this film especially in accordance to it's budget.

Regardless it was well crafted, the tension was clearly evident and the camera work was second to none.

The NZ Film Industry needs more films and Directors with a fresh vision and skill as displayed by this project.

There were some magic moments, one of them is up a tree, very interesting, good acting, good writing. I would recommend this film to anyone who enjoys the Thriller genre or anyone who likes to be surprised by what someone can achieve independently.

This movie is kinda vaguely like the Blair witch project but much much more boring and not even vaguely scary.

I kept watching because some comments said it gets better as it goes on. They lied. Well I guess it did get better, after all it couldn't get much worse, but even better was pitiful.

It's the kind of movie that I might watch if it was on TV and there was nothing else on and I was too tired to get up and find the remote, but I would not suggest that anyone should rent this movie.

The only plus point I can see is it would have been very low budget. The scenes were probably real NZ bush and old buildings, there were no special effects, no big actors. Some of the camera work was fairly good otherwise I would have said it was made by a third form (13 year olds) drama class.

As others have said you do get to know the individuals a bit and the twist at the end was unexpected but all in all not really worth watching.

To be honest, I didn't know what I was in for when I rented this film. Sometimes you come across the most unimaginable films, with p!ss poor story and even worse dialog!

It was around 1am, I put the DVD. {The cover is bit chilling)....... but no horror/ thrills came, nothing... It was like when you rent a movie from the local shop thinking its just an underrated film, but instead you have been tricked by the cover and it's one of those painful amateur films that the shop made the same mistake purchasing it to rent!

BUT!!!!!

I thought the intensity was there, it kept racing along! I really enjoyed the camera work, and a few days later after watching the behind the scenes I really admired the director for the choice of camera mounts!

I thought the film as a whole lacked a little substance/climax, but great work considering budget and actors! The dialog was interesting at parts, and some characters really grabbed me, even made me laugh out loud! There were enough characters for at least one of them to work! Great job on the final sequence and also the stunts!

Thought that it was well put together and had a flow! Keep going, and would like to enjoy another film from this type of artist!