In the Tall Grass

Stephen King - I should have known. All the ingredients are there. So as you can guess then, I have not read the novel this is based on. But I did like the basic idea/theme this is build upon. Actually the very beginning is very strong and that carries throughout the movie.

While it does that, the movie itself feels like it loses a bit of traction, once every character and piece is introduced. I can only imagine (no pun intended), how this is written and how much plays in the mind of the reader. As a movie there are limitations, especially when it comes to one dimensional portrayals - or what feels like paper thin motivation at least. Still enough suspense here and overall a good horror movie.

The story seems to be pretty simple, and I was left wondering how the film can go on for 80 minutes. The story gets a little more complex as time goes on, more thrilling, suspenseful and more disturbing. I enjoyed it.

I liked it. It was on the level of a really well adapted Stephen King TV movie. It's horror with a dash of science fiction. I can't think of anything more descriptive than that. It gets a 7 out of 10 because it doesn't really follow its own rules and the ending is one of those "Because I believe in love" magic endings rather than something that felt really earned. Then and the dialog is hit and miss.

The trailer is enticing, the names associated is even more enticing. I saw this only cos of Patrick Wilson. Stephen King's name wasn't suffice to pull me into this purgatory. It is directed by Vincenzo Natali, the guy who gave us Cube, an awesome thriller. In this film he takes the similar concept from his previous movie Haunter which is decent compared to this.

There is unnecessary repetitive scenes of a pregnant woman screaming, irritating scenes of blurred visions, 101 mins of jus grass swaying which gets repetitive n boring. Ther is absolutely no explanation. I used to think that only Victor Crowley cud smash a person's face/head with bare hands but u have to check out a scene in this film. In some scenes, the child's acting is weak. He is seen trying to control his laughter. Mayb he was laughing at the lousy plot.

Better films on similar concept : Farmhouse, Triangle (Melissa George) n Haunter.

The problem seems to be that some people can't handle the delightful subtlety of some of King's work. Light on plot, sure, but that's not the point. There's a single POINT of plot and everything else is only there to frame it and illustrate it. King thrives in a terrible sense of wrong. Disjointed, twisted, tied-in-knots, all of it ...wrong-but-real. Especially in the short-stories and novellas, King hyper-focuses on a POINT of something terrible and wraps detail around it.

Some adaptations are better than others. This one is really not bad. It's pretty good. The sense of wrong is prevalent, but not insistent. I love the concept of knotted, non-linear time. But even that isn't all of it. (And if you want to look, there ARE sub-plots in the relationships between the characters. But they aren't the point!)

I'm a country-boy. I grew up in farm country. And not even truly LARGE farms, by national standards! As a kid with wide freedom to roam, (free-range, as they say) there was a fear, a wariness of things like the wide corn fields. They are so huge, so endless. Half-way through you start to wonder if you are lost, how you might get out; the doubts begin to creep-in and fear takes root. Things turn sinister as the leaves of the corn give you sharp, paper-cut-like pain, drawing blood as you run through it. ...And that's in the day-time. Try it at night... and the Unknown can grow to fill the edges of the whole world. I know it. I loved it. And I carried a cheap samurai sword everytime I went out to the woods or the fields after dark.

There's some of that in this movie. And with an actor that makes a really good bad-guy. And special effects that do very well to portray a terrible, amorphous, unnameable concept.

This is a well done move. Salute to the director, who took a short novella of treacherous ideas and made a decent 90+ minutes.