Charlotte Wakes

Is bad acting subjective, I don't think so, but it seems that a lot of reviewers don't know what bad acting is, I've been watching movies for 40 years and I know bad acting when I see it, I read the reviews of this movie and I've come to the conclusion that a quite a bit of them are written by people with mental issues, having said all that this isn't that bad and is worth a watch, I gave it a 5 which makes it a fairly average, but not bad, like I said most of the reviews are by people with hang ups or they just don't know what they're talking about, sorry kinda went on a rant, but judgemental people shouldn't do reviews, they can't be objective.

Charlotte (Aisling Knight) takes a job as a cat sitter for a creepy wealthy couple and, immediately after they leave, she begins hearing strange noises coming from upstairs. Perhaps their dead son isn't so dead after all and still lives in the house?

Director Simon Richardson knows how to shoot a movie and build up a reasonable level of tension at times, but his screenwriting skills leave a lot of be desired. The story could be described as House of the Devil, but with a ton of unnecessary padding. Charlotte has a best friend character who could easily have been made for an extra slaying for the body count, but she ends up being pretty useless altogether except for one well done jump scare towards the middle of the film.

Thanks to this and other detours along the way, The Sitter feels endless at about 100 minutes and could benefit from a little editing. At least 10 or 15 minutes could be cut including a few visual interesting but pointless dream sequences that appear to exist only to remind you that you're watching a horror film.

If The Sitter wasn't so well produced, perhaps its story crimes would be forgivable, but it's so obvious that the production team put such great effort in making this as polished and visually pleasing as possible which makes you wonder why they didn't spend as much time on the script.

Yes! It's a low budget horror, but it's definitely watchable, has it's moments and far from the worst out there in the movie universe. No! If you're looking for something special, don't expect The Conjuring level.

The Sitter has quite a few ingredients that usually make for a mindlessly entertaining horror movie: there's a pretty girl in peril, a shower scene (actually, two shower scenes and a bath!), a cat scare, crazy locals, a dream within a dream (actually, I think there were two of those as well), some sex, and one of the characters says "I'll be right back", which means that they won't. Unfortunately, despite all of this, the film doesn't really succeed because they forgot one very important thing: a decent plot.

After psychology student Charlotte (Aisling Knight) has accepted a three day stint as a cat-sitter for a strange couple who live in a remote country house, the film goes absolutely nowhere for most of the remaining running time. The three days pass (slowly), with Charlotte suffering restless nights and hearing strange noises in the house, but otherwise nothing very notable happens (except, of course, for Charlotte's ablutions, and her sexy scene with boyfriend Seth, which are a welcome diversion from the tedium). Then, when the three days are up, Charlotte is abducted and tied up by the religious weirdos that live next door, who say that the girl is in great danger from the couple who hired her.

Charlotte escapes from her captors, only to find out that they were telling the truth: her employers turn out to be crazy cultists who intend to offer her to their hideously deformed son, who looks as though he might be possessed by a demon. At this point, I wonder why we had to wait three days for any of this to happen: if the couple had wanted to offer Charlotte to their son, why not do it straight away? Likewise, why did Charlotte's rescuers leave it three days before trying to whisk the girl to safety? And if they knew what was going on, why didn't they just call the police?

It's lazy writing and makes for a frustrating watch, a shame because Knight isn't a bad actress and deserved to be in a better film.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

I only write reviews if a movie is really great or really awful. In this case it's because it's awful. The lead actress is the best one and that's not saying much. When the actors were speaking, there were long, awkward pauses. It was so boring!! I don't know how they can call this horror. I call it a waste of time I can't get back.