The Death of April

When I sat down to watch the 2022 movie "The Death of April", from writer and director Ruben Rodriguez, I believed I was in for a horror movie. Had I known that it was nothing more than a documentary intermixed with poor quality videos of a woman filming her own life by webcam, I would have given this movie a wide berth.

Writer and director Ruben Rodriguez put together an absolute stinker of a script and storyline, and not even 30 minutes into the ordeal I had lost all interest in the storyline. I have to say that watching people sit around doing fake interviews for a movie and watching crappy quality webcam video just doesn't count as being a proper movie for me, nor does it count as being entertaining.

I wasn't familiar with a single actress or actor on the cast list, but I can't claim to be impressed with what I was witnessed on the screen, because the actresses and actors had a snowballs chance in Hell to deliver anything worthwhile, given the inadequate script and storyline that they had to work with. Not to mention the God awful character gallery.

Visually, then you're not in for anything grand. Well, not unless you consider low quality and grainy webcam footage as being enjoyable.

Do yourself a favor and don't waste 85 minutes of your life on watching this dumpster fire of a movie.

My rating of writer and director Ruben Rodriguez's 2022 laughable attempt at a horror movie lands on a one out of ten stars.

If you love supposed horror movies in which nothing happens in 99% of the movie and nothing is scary, then boy, is this your lucky day! My goodness. Alright, the one positive is that the acting was good. The characters were believable for the most part.

The movie is going for the "was it paranormal or psychological?" trope, which is fine, and which was done well in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose". It was definitely not done well in this film.

The acting was good, but the writing was not great. It was so, so boring that I found myself looking at my phone in many parts. I paid to watch it, so I gave it a chance, but man, it was boring.

Filmmakers, especially horror ones, need to understand that building atmosphere, character development, and all that stuff is great and needed, but unless scary things actually happen, then you are going to lose the audience.

Sorry to be negative. It is not the worst film ever, but it is incredibly boring.

TLDR It's bad

Writing this as a huge Found Footage fan.

I couldn't make it longer than halfway through before I turned it off and fell asleep. It was boring and incredibly cringy.

Lead actress was annoying, real annoying. I think she may suffer from down syndrome or something?

Ontop of that, nothing much happens, it's just her acting like a clown in front of a web camera like she probably does in rl, and it cuts back to her lame family talking about how great a kid she was.....it does this for literally 45 minutes. Occasionally a door would slowly open in the background and they even brought out the tired and predictable ouiji board we've seen in every. Single. Horror movie.

There's much better found footage out there, so if you're looking for a good one, skip this.

People don't want to help the girls is the part that bothered me the most and everyone wanted to ignore everything and that isn't anything that people in your life do.

As far as the genera that this is set in, it could have been put in two or three different categories. The more I watched this the more I wanted to stop only for fact that people would not try to help look into the issues and just wanted to brush her off. That is not a good story or a good feeling and it can causes issues. That could be what the writer wanted to show but it could have been better if she had one person that wanted to help her research it.

After watching all of it, you thoughts can go a couple ways in what the story is behind it all, ghost, mental breakdown, or both.

I would like to post my thoughts but don't want to spoil the movie for anyone.

But I say watch it make you own decision and tell us about it in your perspective.

After disappearing one day, a woman's friends and relatives recount her experiences of her after moving across the country for a new job beforehand and using a series of video diaries to enhance the experience of her slow descent into madness discovering the truth about the whole affair.

Generally, this was a pretty solid mockumentary with a lot to like about it. The idea of this one following along with the typical format where the first half gives us an introduction to her through her friends and family as well as the first video diaries that tell of nothing but exuberance and enthusiasm for the experience sets this off on a nice note. There's a great idea of the normality of her life trying to live on her own through the videos while the talking head interviews offer a similar pattern with the early experiences being discussed being fun and friendly while they slowly and gradually get darker as the videos chronicling her parallel this experience. This leads to the rather fun supernatural antics that are brought up as a means of signaling her subsequent descent into madness. The first stages with the video evidence and investigation into the previous resident come off quite nicely with the early setup beforehand which makes this all rather freaky. Once it gets deeper into the mystery and it becomes far more psychologically damaging as the bizarre encounters and unexplained scenarios keep happening, there's a lot to like with the series of reveals that come about here during the freakouts and snapping going on with those around her that explains the behavioral issues here which gives this a lot to like. There are some drawbacks to be had with the film. The main detriment to the film is the incredibly bizarre hot shotting it does to introduce the supernatural into the film as it seems to get introduced out of nowhere. With the first instances of something going wrong simply being her failure to respond to friends, the sudden introduction of the murder at the apartment and the investigation into the paranormal appear so soon afterward with little build-up or genuine motivation to investigate at this stage of the film feels quite undeserved. There's also the decided lack of urgency towards the glacial plot as this one plays out in a lethargic manner and could've gone much faster which are the issues with this one.

Rated Unrated/R: Language and Violence.