The Hoarder

The whole storyline was intriguing but the ending fell short. I'm not sure if they wanted to make a sequel, but it sure left it open to do so!

Set in a storage facility with a creepy, off-limits basement section, this is by no means a horror classic, but it's watchable. I really don't get why IMDB allows some of the ratings - this is clearly not a 10/10 film to any rational person, so the 10 scores are, one would suspect, from people who worked on the film, and their mums. The 1/10 scores, as always, seem to come from people who seem unable to give any other score if there's anything they don't like about a film. Both should be ignored. There are some decent ideas here, and a reasonable amount of tension. Nobody's getting Oscar-nominated for this, but the acting isn't terrible, nor is the direction. It may not be objectively very good on any level, but neither is it terrible on any level. It's a middling time-filler that deserves a middling score.

Started out okay but quickly degenerated into the characters making progressively dumber decisions, as per the usual formula. The "twist" in the film was beyond ridiculous and pretty much just felt like a cheat. Cap it with an incredibly stupid ending, and The Hoarder goes from a somewhat below-average horror film to a must-avoid-at-all-costs stinker. The early attempts in the film to establish atmosphere are about the only positive things I can say about it.

Your basic creepy creature veers into something else. It's low budget and shows but everyone does their job well enough and there's some genuine eeew and yuck moments. Odd, mixed bag of a cast. Mischa Barton is becoming a familiar face in low budget horror. It's okay certainly not terrible.

I thought this could've been something scary. There actually were some 10 minutes where I was quite scared, but after that first moments of suspense, the rest got too generic and predictable. I did watch it through to the end, although I was tempted to quit more than once.

The storyline is pretty old and I bet you've already seen it in a few other movies yourself:

• A group of people are trapped in some place or another (in a cottage in the woods, on a boat, in some old castle or warehouse) - Someone or something evil is set loose

• group tries to escape but mysterious things prevent them form escaping

• instead of staying together, some girl will separate from the others and follow a creepy noise into a dark place ("hello? is there anybody out there in that creepy forest / tunnel / cave? Maybe the psychopath that killed my boyfriend / husband / friend 10 minutes ago?")

• another girl will try to run away, being chased, then trip over nothing, and stay there screaming while "the evil" hunts her down etc.

You know those ingredients - you've seen them often before.

The only thing new here to me was the setting in an underground self-storage, which I thought had some original ideas that served those few scary moments.

I feel kind of sorry for the director. It feels like this is the desperate (but futile) attempt to fulfill his lifelong childhood dream of producing a super scary blockbuster. In a "i can do it" and "nobody can stop me" brute force way, he tries to patch up all those holes in the illogical and inconsistent story just to quickly get to the end.

If you don't watch this - you won't be missing out on anything...