Red Letter Day

Altho the plot sorta reminds me of a take off on Twilight Zone's 'Monsters on Maple Street' or of the more recent The Purge, it's not as well done, well acted, or well scripted. Disappointing overall and very mediocre even for a B Movie

This one clearly had a small budget but I have a soft spot in my heart for indie horror movies. All things considered the effects were really cool and I was entertained during the entire runtime. Some of the supporting performances are not very strong but I really liked the lead family and the mom was good enough to carry the film. The story was really cool and I really liked the practical effects. Not a bad option for midnight viewing.

This movie draws a lot of obvious comparisons, particularly The Purge. This is reasonable, since the theme of having to defend yourself against your community is an effective one. But the lack of motivation makes this a problem. Nearly every review here says the same thing - why would people kill their targets because an anonymous letter says so? Are we supposed to believe that people are intrinsically bad?

This huge flaw doesn't make it a terrible movie though. The direction is fairly well done, the technical qualities are solid. And it's great to see a horror movie that isn't an inky black swirl. The sound doesn't have any of the annoying habits of massive dynamic range.

There is some weakness in the acting, and it's hard to pinpoint the problem. Every now and then there are little beats of dialogue that don't land correctly. I can't blame this on the actors or the script - I'm not sure which it would be.

The highlight of the movie is a score that seems to borrow from Vertigo. A welcome touch of class, we need more music like this.

Worth a watch, but don't expect to feel completely pleased with it.

Red Letter Day is a movie that should have been picked up by Blumhouse. The story was interesting enough for me to sit through, though the acting was absolutely terrible. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of low budget, badly written and poorly acted movies especially when it comes to the horror genre. But the entire time I found myself thinking about what could have been and who would have been cast in the roles. In all honesty it confuses me how this wasn't a Blumhouse production as it seems to be the exact thing they would normally release. With a better budget and a better cast (personally I was thinking Winona Ryder, Katherine Langford & Alex Wolff) this could have been another horror success but unfortunately this has been released instead

The story of this movie is actually very interesting, and it would be a good movie if it was better done, very bad acting (except for Dawn Van de Schoot, she managed to look great which I guess was an extremely difficult task when everyone else around her did very badly). The movie looks very amateur, bad camera work, the fight scenes were hard to watch, like in a way when you are ashamed in behalf of the director.