Cell Count

The movie sounds promising, it looks promising and it disappoints about as much as a movie possibly could. The first 20 minutes had me on the edge of my seat, not because it was exciting, but because I really thought it would be a good movie.

Then it got progressively worse until the very end. The only thing I can praise is the half decent acting and the extremely promising premise. Everything else is awful, what really got to me and what inspired me to write this, my first review on IMDb, was the plot. It's as if someone, after the first few minutes, came in with a hammer and started bashing the writer slowly but surely until at the end of the script he'd simply lost the capacity to write a coherent story. I don't want to go in to too much detail beyond that because the movie simply does not deserve it.

Avoid!

I like the poster, but it promises something that this movie does not deliver. The movie is very slow, almost like an art-house movie. But it isn't one.

It's very boring for the first twenty minutes. And just when you think that is going to change........it doesn't. It's not scary at all, and it has some really old stereotypical characters (like a doctor with a German accent)I managed to sit through the first 45 minutes of it, i should get a medal for that. I've given it more then one chance. But it was all just a disappointment. The actors did their best (the main characters, i believed in their fictional marriage)but when you have a script this bad that doesn't help much. I will not remember this film for very long. It made absolutely no impact.

This is now the second film I've seen from this director, and believe me, if this were the days before digital cameras, this man would never be allowed near a real film set. I review films for a living, both for a major publication and for a festival (that this film was rejected from) and this movie falls short in nearly every way. I won't waste my time or yours writing a thorough review, but STAY AWAY! unless Troma movies are your guilty pleasure, this kind of amateur work will not entertain you. The poorly written dialogue, to the slow pacing make this a laughable addition to the horror genre. The butt-holed man was probably one of the dumbest creatures to every grace a movie screen. Awful, awful filmmaking.

When I sat down to watch "Cell Count" it was without having any idea what the movie was about or who was in it. All I knew was that it was a horror movie, and that the cover of the movie looked like something from the 1980's, which initially caught my interest and attention.

The story in "Cell Count" is about a group of people who are brought to a facility in order to participate in a study for a cure for some kind of disease. But the cure turns out to be a deadly process.

Actually, throughout the entire movie, you sit with a bunch of questions, waiting for the storyline to initially reveal the answers to these questions. However, when the movie ends you still sit there with the questions unanswered, if not actually with even more questions than you started out with. And on that account, the movie didn't really deliver much or prove to be satisfactory.

The movie does bear witness to it not being a huge multi-million dollar budget movie. But actually, that doesn't really matter, because they pulled it off nicely enough.

But, the movie does trod along at a fairly slow pace, leaving you with your questions unanswered, and you feel that you are getting nowhere actually. As such, the movie does become tedious and rather slow. I managed to stick with the movie to the very end, because I was hoping to get some answers, although I ended up with no such thing.

"Cell Count" is not among the most interesting or exciting moving that I have seen, nor is it among the most boring and lame movies either. It is just below average, and it is the type of movie that once you've seen it you will never put it back in the DVD player a second time.

Let me preface this by saying that I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I went in expecting a thriller, not a horror, and it actually quenched my expectations fully and with a little bit of horror tossed in on the side it made for a pleasant viewing. And from the reviews on this site I honestly wasn't expecting too much. But I've experienced this kind of incongruity on IMDb time and time again. Great film, terrible reviews.

I'll start with it's strongest point which is the story. The story is absolutely fantastic and was presented almost flawlessly. You can feel the misdirection, as thick as arctic sea smoke, which is the key signature to a thriller's atmosphere. It'll start asking you questions that you didn't even know you wanted to ask. There was not a single moment when I felt I knew exactly what was going to happen next and yet everything was still easy to follow which, IMHO, is where most films (in this genre especially) go wrong. Even to the very end you're still asking questions but if you payed even a modicum of attention you'll understand everything just fine.

The acting was decent. Some parts were a little weaker than others mostly due to underacting in a few scenes that involve gore/action, which detracted from the experience but considering that we're not talking about million dollar A list actors the performances passed my own personal 'litmus test' and I consider it quite nominal. One scene in particular will linger in my mind as the most outrageous and yet most underacted scene in film history due mostly to the writing rather than acting oddly enough. Came across a boorish sight gag to me.

Cinematography and editing was well done. The special effects and CG left something to be desired but I'm sure it was a matter left to budget rather than talent or design/concept.

Don't follow the 'advice' of the other reviewers. This film is much more than the poor (and poorly written) reviews it's received thus far. Watch it and expect an independent film that will delivers a clever story not as a premium blockbuster the AAA studios churn out.