Shut In

Most Horror films attempt to capitalize on natural human fears in order to invoke nervousness, discomfort and terror in the audience. While many focus on the fears of our "inner children" (ghosts, monsters and loss of security-inspiring figures), others focus on more "mature" fears like fear of the unknown and/or not understood. Shut In (Intruders) is of the latter kind, attempting to use the uneducated's fear of mental illnesses while utilizing the fear of potential home invasion as back up.

Anna (a very nice performance by Beth Riesgraf, delivering a convincing and realistic paranoid and phobic woman) is agoraphobic, and has not left the comfort of her home in 10 years. One of her only human contacts (wouldn't be accurate to call him a friend) is Danny (Rory Culkin, in my opinion the best performance among the cast), a delivery boy bringing her meals and groceries. When Anna's brother dies, she wholeheartedly offers Danny an extremely generous tip so he can quit his dead end job and follow his dreams. Embarrassed of course, Danny politely declines, and later tells a friend about the experience. Little does he know his friend and his friend's brother mean to break into Anna's home during her brother's funeral, and rob her blind. However, the burglars had no clue about Anna's agoraphobia, and when they break in and find Anna at home - things become complicated.

The story involves two coinciding plots. The first revolves around the three burglars, who are no more than petty thieves and did not set out on this endeavor with intentions of physically hurting anyone. The characters are quite stereotypical. JP (Jack Kesy) is the leader of the gang, attempting to balance out the situation so it turns out in their favor. Vance (Joshua Mikel) is his brother (Danny's friend) who lives in his shadow, and has brought him the information that has made the operation possible in hopes of earning his respect. And then there's Conrad (Timothy T. McKinney), JP's psycho sadistic friend, who's in it for the thrill as well as the payout. Nothing too fancy or original, but it manages to capture the viewer attention and add to the suspense.

The second and more central plot revolves around Anna. In order to avoid any possible spoilers, let me stick to what the trailers already reveal - Anna is not as helpless as she appears to be, and her being home turns out to be the least of the robbers' problems. The way the story plays out is not nearly intense enough to qualify as a revenge flick, and (in my opinion) not remotely frightening or even discomforting enough to be considered Horror.

All in all, Shut In isn't anything fancy. Yet while being mediocre and almost mundane, it succeeds in being interesting and entertaining enough by eliciting curiosity and sympathy. You could obviously find a better film to watch, but should you not - give this a try, you might enjoy it more than I did.

Intruders (2015) is a solid, but flawed indie thriller. I went into this movie with extremely low expectations. I thought it would be terrible. While the movie isn't great, it still exceeded my expectations. The acting was alright, but the slow buildup kept the movie engaging. The pacing was steady, and kept the movie flowing.The plot twist wasn't anything special, but at least is wasn't mindbogglingly stupid, it was tolerable. My big problem with this movie is its repetitiveness. The dialogue repeats itself many times, making it extremely painful at certain points. Still, the direction of this film is adequate, the setting is sufficient, and overall, this is an all right movie. It's nothing remarkable, but it is certainly not terrible.

Stumbled on while cruising stations for a flick break. This one caught my curiosity off guard. Starts you off in one direction that gets you wondering where the story is leading and slowly reveals the real powers at play. Acting is above average and the suspense will keep you watching.

I wasn't too bored watching it, so I guess that's a plus.

But overall I can't say that this was very impressive, we've seen it all before (even though the movie does throw a rather surprising twist at us which by all means is not a new one it's usually just delivered more upfront).

The characters didn't seem very believable to me either, not necessarily bad acting just very 2-dimensionally written characters that didn't feel real, and things that were supposed to be shocking just came across as the opposite.

And it just completely lacks the edge that it clearly was meant to have.

It's not absolutely terrible though but it's kinda like when you are thirsty and you'd really like a cold soda, and instead you get a lukewarm one that's gone flat.

Has had 3 name-changes I know of since it's release: The Lifetime movie sounding 'Deadly Home' the incredibly unoriginal 'Intruders' and the best one: 'Shut In'...

And that's just the ones I know of, it's almost like it decided to change name of it for every bad review it got.

Interesting what happens when you break into a house and try to rob a crazy person. Sometimes the criminals do get what they deserve.