The Curse of the Necklace

But for reasons only known to certain people, parents never can explain the simplest things to their children. Like your dad is a drunken obnoxious thief who stole a piece of costume jewelry as a make up gift for his wife who see him for the POS that he is. Or when told to do something, these kids do the opposite, and a better ending would have been all of them not making it top the final credits, but here we go with the BS Happily ever after nonsense. But what else did you expect when this movie was co=produced by the principle actors families.

I didn't find this very watchable, predictable yes, but hardly watchable due to the many cliched teenage angst/malcontent and basically being rebels without a clue.

Frank is a cop who's been exiled by wife Laura, and he thinks he found a way back into her good graces when he stumbles onto an amulet from a cold case in the evidence room. However, it ends up in the clutches of their daughters, Ellen, who begins seeing a mysterious little boy, and Judith, who begins seeing a sinister woman.

To be blunt, the target demographic on this movie is teenage girls, and it's sure to please them. This is a period piece and has a real Conjuring/Insidious type of vibe, with a smattering of The Exorcist. Good acting, compelling characters, effective creepiness, a mix of both practical and CG FX.

But I'm a jaded old fart and couldn't help but feeling a sense of "been there, done that." All of the pieces came together very well, but it just didn't feel like it had anything to really make it stand out from other movies of the ilk. Still, on its own merits, it's a good movie... I'm just way outside the target demo.

With a title like that, the movie already promised a generic plot, and that is exactly what you get here. A cop, played by Henry Thomas, tries to buy his way back into the lives of his estranged wife and two daughters, played by Violet McGraw and Madeleine McGraw, by gifting his ex-wife an antique necklace he found in an old police cold case file. With that, he unknowingly unleashes an evil entity onto his family, and from that point on, we get a very generic possession story involving a ghost child.

The most interesting aspect the movie has to offer is the cast, with Henry Thomas and the McGraw twins, whose careers I was curious to follow. They do a decent job with the material given, and the rest of the cast is also overall fine. The story itself feels very familiar and ends up being underwhelming, even though the movie has decent production quality. I have definitely seen worse movies, but The Curse of the Necklace doesn't offer anything particularly interesting or unique to the viewer. It is completely forgettable, and not even the likable cast could salvage anything from this flick. If you are a seasoned horror fan, you have seen similar movies hundreds of times, and this one lacks the strengths needed to make its narrative either memorable or enjoyable. [4.0/10]

Stuck in the middle, siblings trying to navigate how to deal with their quarreling parents find solace with a special necklace being used as a bartering tool to get on their good side, but after a series of horrific visions learn the truth about what the necklace means and must try to stop it.

Overall, this was a fairly fun if problematic genre effort. Among the better aspects of this one is the impressive mystery that takes place here as everything offers a fun build-up to everything. The central setup of the necklace being given as a present through negligent means as he fails to understand the point of the case and then fails to understand why the family members are being subjected to supposed visions of ghosts that are from somewhere he can't understand offers a fine starting point for this one. The concurrency investigation into what's going on with everything they keep experiencing and learning more about the actual events that happened throughout the case makes everything far more intriguing than anything as more clues are unraveled and revealed. That goes along with the series of intriguing encounters with the haunted beings at the center of everything. The initial encounters with the children appearing around the house interacting with the ghost child to the point they claim it's an imaginary friend following them around that starts to send off alarms about something not being right. The continued hauntings and encounters here offer up the kind of traditional haunted house format where it's' emphasis on quick-shot appearances of the grotesque and deformed ghosts appearing out of nowhere to scare them with the misunderstandings arising out of not knowing what's going on leading into the fantastic finale with not just a seance trying to figure everything out but a more involved series of encounters with the ghost to solve the haunting in fine form. There are some big factors with this one that bring it down. One of the biggest drawbacks here is the squabbling family dynamics that are in place here that put so many of the encounters into question. The main gist of the strained relationship drawing attention away from the kids and into the father being away and trying to get into their good graces again with the necklace only to find the questionable nature of how he got it in the first place to put the two at odds with each other once again to ignore the daughters' visions and claims of hauntings. It's not all that interesting to go through this kind of cliched setup to get the parents away from the encounters the kids are having which would've been easy to figure out and stop had they been around. That highlights the other issue with this one in the longer than necessary running time that drags the pace down considerably. Not only are the scenes of the parents fighting dull and overdone but the other scenes involving the family struggling to remain together or pleading with each other to figure out what's going on with each other that it all comes off with so little sense of energy that it's sluggish presentation does bring about an overlong running time. Other factors, like several flashbacks to the original family trying to solve the case about what's going on with them to solve what's going on with the current family end up allowing the slow-going pace to run itself out at a longer time than it needed. These do manage to bring this down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence, Language, and children-in-jeopardy.

Turns out to be a possession'ish story, one that needs to be shortened a lot. Be prepared for a lot of padding unless you need something to put you to sleep. I would really liked to have rated this higher because its a well made movie and there's a lot of very nice cinematography in it. The special fx are nice and they keep it pretty dark.

There are a lot of 'I would like to haves' but what's the point. What is this necklace? You must wait 1hr till any information about it comes forward. Jumping forward 1hr isn't a bad move because up until that point its just a mildly tormented family story. You'll want some coffee for this one because you don't want to fall asleep. It gets pretty good in the last leg.

Better movies like this that I would recommend; The Amityville Horror(1979), The Omen(1976), Poltergeist(1982), Pet Sematary(1989), or The Exorcist(1973).