Second Coming

This is what an indie film should look, feel and be. An intelligent thriller.

I saw this about a year ago at a local screening and was quite impressed with what I saw. In a world where most indie horror flicks are full of cheesy zombies, stupid inane direction, and shots that look straight out of a porn film...Second Coming is a film that shows that independent micro budget movies can compete against studio films.

The plot of the film has been seen before, and some of the acting might be wooden, but there is intelligence, great craft and true film-making behind this thing. With a little bit more money...I can only imagine what these people can do.

Great performances from the lead, Greg Thompson, and Haley Boyle is simply amazing playing a double role as the little twins.

The direction, writing and photography are top notch, not an easy task considering that it was shot for very little, as they explained in the screening I saw.

Do yourself a favor and rent this one, if you are a fan of old school thrillers and hate typical Hollywood endings...you'll enjoy this one.

Highly Recommended.

If you like to watch plots unfold slowly as the movie progresses, like light bulbs going off revealing answers to perplexing questions as you go, I think you'll really like this movie. It shows the uniqueness of the bond between twins, as one twin gets "messages" or "visions" from the other as to why she's missing, and where she is. With their disturbing past being revealed as the story progresses, things get more and more unsettling. It's not the most "scary" movie I've ever seen, but it's got more intrigue and dark character building than a lot of horror films I've seen. The special effects are quality - it kept my attention all the way. And I think some of the characters were interesting that weren't necessarily the leads. My favorite part is the ending, which I really didn't see coming.

Second coming failed to capture my attention. The story was over-dramatic, poorly written and the situations were unbelievable. It seemed to have been written by someone who had never been through anything similar, and wrote about what they imagined it would be like. About a quarter of the way into the movie, I realized that the story was not interesting, and my mind started wandering. By the end of the movie, I was having to rewind just so I would be able to see what happened. And when the movie ended, I had not even realized this until about 30 seconds into the credits.

I can, however, say the camera work was well done. It's just unfortunate that the camera had to be focused on such poor acting. If visuals made a movie good, this would have been a great flick.

This movie had several interesting elements: Asian horror style ghosts, twin sisters and flashes of their brutal childhood, and the primary story of a girl searching for her missing twin. At the same time it deals with guilt, fear and revenge. this film just never managed to pull everything together.

While it isn't a terrible film, it felt like it wasted so much of its originality and concept due to the lack of execution. There's a lot of influences from Asian horror movies in this film but not blatant or distracting.

That's the first half of the movie. The second half of the movie takes an turn away from the supernatural origins to a ridiculous revenge plot. While I understand the director intentionally left some parts of the story unresolved, it arrived at such unexpected conclusion via a nonsensical path.

Overall it isn't a bad film. It had a lot of interesting spots, but it took too long to fully develop, and when it finally got going, the story turns and becomes rather pointless.

While not perfect, I was very impressed with the level of craft shown on this film, specially knowing of its low budget ahead of time ( I read it through Fangoria Magazine). And it was real low. But lets not have an opinion based on the budget of the film, it is actually a smart, well presented thriller- drama. The problem I see with little films that look this great is that they often get judged as a larger film, which is unfair. Also, this is not a horror film, it is a small drama. It is a shame distributors are selling it like that. This leads to some critics getting upset at it because it was "not scary" enough. I think this one is a winner and one can see we are not dealing with some amateur director with no ambition ( which by the way, not only directed the thing, shot it and wrote it. I rented it on Netflix, along with another low budget horror film. That other film cost 4 times more and had none of the skills shown here.

I am very impressed. Great story, not perfect, but great. Good performances from most of the cast. Very good photography and overall, a great effort. If this is the starting point for this director, I can only imagine what lies in his future.