Milwood

Where do I begin? So bad...let me count the ways...

I wasted an hour and a half on this horrible movie. No one can act, nothing makes sense, you don't know what the point is, none of it is realistic.

Oy vey! Run away!

The eleven year-old boy Nathan Perry (Christian Goodwin) is beloved by his parents that are going to give a dog for him. However his family is destroyed in a car accident when his parents die and the boy is sent to the custody of Milwood, an orphanage managed by Mr. Clemens (Jimmy Scanlon). The boy is treated with love by the social assistant Judy (Michelle Romano), but abused by Mr. Clemens. When Nathan is bullied by other boys, Mr. Clemens sends him to the feared Ward B and the mean Katherine Rizzo (Tiffany Shepis) becomes his tutor and he has medical assistance from the weird Doctor Charles (Don Tempesta). While snooping around the Ward B, Nathan discloses a dreadful secret. What have him discovered?

"Milwood" is an amateurish, brutal and pointless drama. The plot is confused and it is never clear the motives of Mr. Clemens and Doctor Charles: are they simply deranged sadists with their experiments or do they sell organs? The cinematography, lighting and edition are awful. The histrionic Jimmy Scanlon has a ham performance and only Christian Goodwin has an excellent performance. Michelle Romano has a nice character and also a good performance. The government sends the boys to the custody of Milwood, but there is no audits, in a very strange behavior. The marketing of this drama is completely wrong and viewers believe it is a horror film. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Orfanato" ("Orphanage")

Flat story, acting, everything! Steer clear of this monstrosity.

Dear Reader, Bearing in mind the film was released in 2013, a wider or broader context and evaluation is worth considering. I'm not going to dwell on peripherals such as low budget aspects but instead I will draw your attention to historical precedents and actions which are brought up to date during the drama. Those of you who study and value the apparent lessons we were meant to have learnt from the past see immediately that we are trapped in an endless prison of cruelty and violence . This is what the film is about. It requires a level of perception which some individuals do not possess nor are capable of ever seeing. With hindsight, a lot of the plot becomes very obvious, drawing on Dr Mengele, for example, Lord of the Flies, and Clockwork Orange. The reign of terror and intimidation within this orphanage carries on unchecked and un monitored. All the comments on this production either shy away from this or maybe the writers were watching an entirely different film? The message is powerful but the very fact that non-action is as sinful as action brings the evil out into the open. The smuggled camera ruse was brilliant - how else to garner vital evidence? This in itself may be a fictional drama / plot but behind the fiction lies a hideous world where such actions take place and are taking place unchecked. Looked at from another angle and this film is a wake-up call in every regime built on brutality, torture and total disregard for human lives.

First of all, let me say that this movie is terrible. Really REALLY bad. The camera work is pedestrian, the acting is scraping the bottom of the barrel. The kid was the only decent actor in the movie. The dialog is truly ridiculous at points, and the details propelling the plot forward don't make any sense. This is further confounded by the way the time line jumps around, making for a movie that lurches along like a wounded animal. The story, at its core, is good, and the movie could have been truly great had it been made by entirely different people. Using haunting as a metaphor for the true horrors that are frequently faced by orphaned children, and ward B as a symbol of the powerlessness of children who are designated wards of the state, could have been crafted into a truly poignant, moving, and ultimately unforgettable work of cinematography, but, unfortunately, this clumsy attempt at that, fails in every way. If Scorsese had made this film, it would have been a masterpiece.