Mary

Greetings from Lithuania.

"Mary" (2019) is a disappointing horror flick, even if i did not expected anyting from it. I saw at the movie theater, without knowing anything about it, were it was shown without any advertisement or anything like that - and i do understand why - because it was so poor.

Although it has an OK premise which could have turned into a good movie, unfortunately it was the writing which derailed this flick. It even stars Gary Oldman in a "give me that paycheck" role, and he was good in this film, given the material.

Overall, a nice premise couldn't save this flick from being blow average. Its not terrible, but its a poor one.

Okay, so there's nothing new here, or particularly original, but from the get go at least there are characters on display and they are behaving believably. Makes you a little more vested in the situation as it unfolds. I don't know that the flashback structure of it helped any, but what most folks want to know is "was it scary?" or "was it stupid?" For my tastes it was involving enough, with a few creepy vibes but nothing really exceptional. I could have done without the lazy go to of repeated nightmares in order to have something unnerving happen. Make the shocks part of the story! Make them part of the situation! We lose investment if we expect every unusual occurrence to just be a harmless dream. But that being said, at least it wasn't stupid the rest of the time and I never had the urge to fast forward thru it. Entirely acceptable. But I doubt I'll ever watch it again. There needs to be an option with the streaming services between "liked" and "disliked".

Even Nicolas "I will take any acting job for money" Cage passed this one. That should say enough. The movie is boring and takes too long building up the characters and story. And when it finally should take off, it never really does. It's not scary, not exciting and no fun. Calling this "horror" is a complete joke.

Trapped on the open sea in a haunted boat is an oft-seen horror movie scenario, but rarely has it been used with as little imagination as in Mary. In telling his nautical tale of terror, director Michael Goi employs so many hackneyed techniques that even the talents of Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer cannot prevent the film from being a colossal waste of time.

Introducing his film at Frightfest, Goi claimed to have over 18,000 films in his collection, so one wonders why he directs like he's only ever seen a handful, and bad ones at that. One might think that with such a wealth of inspiration, he could have come up with something a little more creative... something that didn't rely so heavily on obvious supernatural jump scares accompanied by obligatory loud noises. The scenes intended to have me throwing my popcorn in the air in fright actually had me holding my head in dismay: this is about as basic as horror movies get.

3/10. I imagine that It'll be a case of abandon ship for many who dare to sail these treacherous waters.

What on earth is Gary Oldman doing in this very low budget and formulaic ghost story? Apart from a few cheap jump scares this is very slow and boring. It has been done better loads of times before and has very little originality.