Artik

Was recommended this film and really enjoyed how well and professionally it was done. The plot kept me engaged and anxious to find out what the world / story would reveal and where the trip would lead. Really solid work. I recommend to check it out. The director did a great job with tension and the gore and violence are shot really well.

The good: it's grain and well-shot. Congrats for hiring a real DP and film crew with actual knowledge of camera placement, movement and lighting. Most of the cast is good. The music is rocking, and adds to the overall good atmosphere. The makeup is quite professional. The horror is adequately tense.

The bad: the guy playing the baddie is bad at acting. And his dialogue is so idiotic. It would have been much better if he was mute. And the overall film is just kinda there.

I think people are being overly kind to this movie because it's shot relatively competently but there's pretty much no real story going on to the point I don't know if you can really call it a "movie". Once you take out the time the opening and closing credits take up this movie is only about an hour long, and most of that is filled with Artik mumbling and bumbling about and extremely boring and poorly acted scenes that occur in the nearby town. There's only two real scenes of violence/gore to show that he's a serial killer and they're pretty tame, and I watched the supposed uncut version which means the normal version must have somehow been even shorter and tamer.

It's nonsense and even with such a short run time was pretty boring and uneventful. I read other reviews about how the ending sequence was action packed and full of gore...no it's not. This is a nothing movie where no one shows any acting skills, the script is non-existent, and while I didn't hate it or anything I simply didn't care once it ended. Pretty pointless ultimately.

The trailer really did its job well, made me eager to see the film. It looked like a dark, gritty and violent revenge type film. But it's just the run of the mill hick farmer killer who uses his kids as slaves and a nosey straight edge man who decides he'll be a hero and save the kid. And that really is all there is to it. Nothing more. Shame as the film in the trailer looked great. The film is kinda tame really with hardly any gore to speak of and forget character development. It's not bad acting etc but just didn't go anywhere at all. Disappointing.

With a nice poster from the awesome artist Christopher Shy & a confusing but decent trailer "Artik" landed on my watchlist and, well, managed to disappoint me more than to impress.

"Artik" seems to have all the right ingredients for an awesome ride of horror including well done visuals (nicely done practical gore, actually great cinematography and lightining, kind of grindhouse-ish look etc.), a pretty typical but cool and fitting original score (not so great overall sound editing though), a great looking, murderous villain, rural setting and whatnot. Sounds good, but there were many faults regarding the acting, the story and the point of it all. First of all, the performance behind the character of Artik himself was... shabby. I'm not sure if it's bad acting all around or just an inability to act with voice, but something was off there. The rest of the performances were alright, with Chase Williamson on top. The biggest issue is the story - the synopsis here on IMDb sounds more interesting than it actually is. People have been praising "Artik" saying that "if you like comic book movies, you'll like Artik". I disagree, the comic book shtick plays a very small role in the plot, amounting to only visual references, without having much impact on the overall idea of this flick. Could've been anything else instead of comic books. Also, most of the characters are pretty underdeveloped and don't get a proper closure, because the last 15 minutes are a tiring edit of small scale action scenes. And then it ends. I have to say that the 69 minute runtime (without the end titles) plays in favor of "Artik", in favor for the viewers.

I don't regret watching "Artik" and I liked it just enough, but I can't call this a good movie - it's almost good. One side of the coin is shiny enough, but the other oh so rusty. My rating: 4/10.