Juegos satánicos

I was really enjoying Satanic, but it falls under the category for me as another film slain by its own ending.

It tells the story of two young couples on a macabre road trip to see sites of murders and general "Satanic" behavior. Along the way they come across a young runaway who changes everything for them.

Starring Justin Chon and Sarah Hyland it looks the part, is very well written and I was fairly gripped to see quite where this was going to go.

Sadly most of the movie is character development and fluff, when the story really kicks in it's a bit of a blink and you'll miss it situation so suffice to say it has chronic pacing issues.

And then the finale! I do hate it when an ending can kill an up to that point enjoyable film, but here once again we have it. It feels rushed, it feels poorly thought out and as if the creators simply ran out of ideas and tacked some random nonsense on instead.

I should be singing the movies praises right now, the majority of the film is great and in the right hands it could have been something special. Instead this poorly thought out little horror is mediocre and a marker for what should have been.

The Good:

Looks great

Solid cast

Some great ideas

The Bad:

Poorly paced

Falls apart at the end.

Pretty average movie overall sub par story line somewhat offset by good acting.

I don't think it deserves the particularly scathing reviews on here - the story line was a bit muddled but the acting was actually quite good. The characters are played quite well and the main actress (Sarah Hyland from modern family) does a brilliant job in this.

It has some scares in it probably not as much as your used to from your average horror movie though. Its kind of creepy but again not as much as your average horror. Where it shines is the few scares it does have are very well placed and managed to give me a couple of jolts. There's a lot in this movie that you have to piece together for yourself - the movie itself doesn't seem to really care whether you got the plot point or got lost along the way and explains nothing.

All up 5/10 - 7/10 for the acting, 3/10 for the story line.

It seems like one of the hardest things to get out of Hollywood or an indie producer is a decent horror movie. "Satanic" is yet another in a long line of below par, forgettable horror movies made in the past 10 years. But at least it's not another crappy found footage film.

The production values on this movie are pretty good... again, no shaky, hokey found footage documentary-style garbage. Sound editing is pretty solid. The movie poster is ridiculous, but the movie looks and sounds pretty good.

But the story is weak... the story that picks up with Alice in the hotel makes no sense, and there's not much attempt to explain any of it. And these characters are awful. From the start, the four travelers come across as a bunch of self-absorbed, arrogant jerks. Seth the "goth" guy is particularly punchable. David and Elise are okay, but the former is pretty unbearable at the start. The tighten up a bit and get better as the trouble starts hitting them, but by that point I really had lost all interest in them. Some people have mentioned Sarah Hyland as being a star of some sort, but I've never heard of her or seen her show, and in this movie she's just your average "good girl" that you get in a horror movie... ends up being the Scream Queen. But she's not all that impressive... more irritating towards the end than anything else, really.

And the ending... meh.

If you don't expect much from your horror movies and are a very generous sort, it's possible you could give this a 4, I suppose. I was originally going to give this a 1, but that's not fair given the number of staggeringly awful horror films out there (like "American Poltergeist", "Ouija Experiment 2", etc).

The formula is pretty much standard. You take an up and coming young starlet (Modern Family's Sarah Hyland ) and throw her in a B movie. The film gets a bump in eye balls because of her potential star power and she gets to push away her TV star image and see if she has any pull with a wider audience.

On paper it makes sense, and the quality of the movie is almost unimportant. Well, this time the product is one of the most unforgettable films you may never see, and really all the sadder because the 1st ½ of the film did have promise.

The plot is simple - 4 young college students go to LA for a tour of Satanic sites, and my pet cat can guess how it goes from there. The actors have potential, and although Hyland is the star, Steven Krueger is by far the most interesting character, playing a 'nice' jock. His story could have been much more interesting, and they simply toy with his religious nature before forgetting it ever existed.

The director does a nice job building tension (or is it just boring?), until a very sudden and particularly still conclusion. I can't decide if the sound track and back ground noise are cool or super dumb.

The real fall of this movie is that is brings nothing new or interesting to the genre. There is basically 0 explanation and logic to several of the key parts of the film. Good horror is similar to detective films where the audience gets some joy out of figuring out the meanie, and coming up with a theory of how to protect themselves were they in a similar situation. Think of it as a choose your own adventure where someone else is making the choices, and it is fun to think about how things would differ had a character made the other choice. This film robs us of that, and it is why it ultimately fails.

Hello Sarah Hyland, we see you outside your comfort zone. Acting and tension 'B', directing, plot and enjoyment 'F'.

A tour of LA's creepiest places leads to a chance encounter with a strange woman and a dangerous ritual for four visiting students.

The protagonists are unlikeable, and the time wasted developing them just makes them more so, but there's enough that's creepy and disturbing about Satanic to make it an acceptable horror film. Nothing you'll want to see twice, but if you and your friends just want a dumb horror movie, Satanic is better than a lot of things you could settle for.

At times, it feels like a vanity project for Hyland, whose character is the movie's conscience and reason and everything else that's supposedly decent and mature, but as with all vanity projects, it ends up a poor way to showcase her potential. When she wants to be cute, she's cute enough, but when she's scared she comes off as hysterical, and when she's righteous, she comes off as overbearing. It's hard to say how much of this is the fault of the script or direction.