The Sandman

Terrible graphics and even worse acting from the child. Predictable horror made for an awful movie.

Woof. Bad writing, bad acting, bad effects... Just bad. And the annoying little girl wasn't trying to stop anything and didn't even act afraid. She just conjured up the Sandman to kill folks on a whim and looked like she enjoyed it. So unlikable. My sons and I did get entertainment value from making fun of it, but that's it.

Then this movie might be for you.

This is one of those movies that is a fairly typical representation of what horror movies have devolved into - honestly, there appear to be more movies released in this genre than any other every year, but the majority are always rated as mediocre at best.

Typical unrealistic behavior from the characters, mediocre writing, cheap jumpscares that aren't actually scary but are very predictable, and just bad writing and acting.

I won't give any major spoilers, but let's just review the aunt's behavior in one scene. She comes home with the child, hears police across the street and with no reason why, she storms across the street, shoves her neighbors out of the way violently and rudely. She then gets confrontational with the cops all in order to just ask what happened, and then starts violently yelling at another cop because she remembers seeing him somewhere else. This behavior is borderline psychotic in the context within the movie and completely unrealistic in any way, but this isn't even the worst example of poor writing this has to offer - the child's acting is a lot worse.

This felt like a movie with a B budget, but then everything else was a solid C- at best. Sure, there are some positive reviews for it, but I suspect that those are from people that simply don't really pay attention to detail when watching movies - you know, they like to disengage the brain as if that is supposed to excuse sloppy movie making. If I have to pretend to be a moron to enjoy it, then guess what...

The movie has a crew of decent actors, but the whole Sandman creature was very lamely done, which really wrecked the movie. Also, throwing in superpowers was just getting silly. I give the 4 stars to the actors who really did a decent job in making a lifeless script come to some sort of life, but the really poor direction & shooting of the film, along with the silly sandman creature could not lift this attempt off the ground very far.

This was a real disappointment - the Sandman, an iconic figure in horror, ruined by a bad script and worse acting. The characters were undeveloped, and their lines, admittedly bad, were just made worse by bad acting, and the script fell flat trying to give the story a twist.