Walled In - Murata viva

The talented and beautiful Mischa Barton is a good actress well above the usual CW standard. She deserves to make it big on the silver screen. However she seems to be doing a lot of bad b movies recently especially badly written horror movies. This movie was interminable, unpleasant, not very scary and overall a waste of time. Set in a gloomy building set for demolition, Mischa plays a demolition expert sent to assess the building and she encounters an even gloomier cast of characters there. The pace is glacial and the situations are just boring. Cameron Bright of the Twilight sequels isn't quite enough to carry the movie as supporting cast either.

Unfortunately even as a fan of Mischa, it was a struggle to finish this boring dud.

I rented this movie yesterday and really didn't expect much to be honest. Many current horror titles are very uninspired and frankly rely too much on gore and not enough on story or atmosphere. I was surprised though, it was an engaging story, taking inspiration for Poe perhaps, Agento and others which isn't a bad thing, and actually keeping a sense of its own identity and style. I love horror movies, especially ones that rely more on imagination and atmosphere, this one does to an extent but then focuses on the human element and becomes more of a thriller, in this I felt a little cheated.

The building which is the object of the movie is simply a nice piece of Gothic, deco art. Sinister and yet elegant in its simplicity, huge and monstrous in its presence. The premise works in the beginning and the actors do not disappoint. It is suggestion that works here as well as a psychological drama that is as twisted as an abnormal Mother and son relationship and dark secrets of the past mingled with arcane knowledge of the architecture of forbidden temples. Sadly though, I wished for more emphasis on the later aspect, it held my interest and fascination, but it veered into a film about a demented teenage crush. If more time had been spent on the architect, his history and theories as well as the previous murders then the chill factor would have been amped up.

The building should have been the real star here and its creator and to a large extent it is, yet it slowly is pushed into the background and dwarfed by a teenager's obsession and some of the dwellings rather seemed to be almost inconsistent in their art direction. The inhabited dwellings almost seemed cheap, bland compared to the overall presence of the building. It caused a sense of confusion, perhaps intentional.

Enjoyable yet flawed and could have been developed into a much richer film. It is still a fun view. I hope the director continues with the genre, though this film has its flaws, the director has potential.

I had high hopes for this movie after seeing the trailer. This could have been a good movie, but... The production team seemed to have run out of money, and then had to wrap it up really fast half way through, causing a hasty and staggering series of quick shots with "one-take" scenes. This, obviously, made the actors look bad and that's a shame. They did a good job at the beginning of the film. The first 20-30 minutes of the movie is actually pretty good, but I'll save you the time by saying that it went downhill FAST. I'll give you perspective that the budget of a film means nothing to me. Sure, I love the special effects that make the big-budget films soar and help tell the story, but I like the low-budget, indie films just as well, provided it tells a good story. This film has neither. When they started to rush, they lost the viewer by getting off track, and seemingly changing the actual story line, making it confusing, wobbly-paced, and completely destroying the story. Not intense, not scary, not interesting. Save your time and enjoy a good indie thriller or a big-budget film that you've yet to see.

This movie really isn't terrible. It's a little weird, but it's well shot and the acting is decent. I'd watch if again if I were drunk or bored- or both.

Walled In is the kind of horror film that sets itself up in a bizarre location and then explains all kinds of bizarre rules to make the scariness work. The movie opens with a series of headlines that explain the terrible discovery of 16 bodies cemented into the walls of a building, including that of the architect who designed it. We learn that the person who walled them in, Joseph Malestrazza, was never caught, and then we cut to 15 years later, when the building is planned to be demolished.

Mischa Barton stars as Samantha, a young member of the demolition company family, perfectly named the Walczak's (the 'c' is silent). She recently graduated from engineering school and it becomes her first lone assignment to visit the building and supervise its demolition. It's a perfect set-up for a horror movie, I suppose, although as soon as we get to the building, the one where the 16 bodies were discovered, you remember, and learn that the wife and son of the murdered architect are still living there, the movie takes a pretty serious turn for the worse. I would think that if a man suffered the terrible fate of being murdered and cemented into the walls of a building, his wife would take it upon herself not to raise their son for his entire life in that building. But that's me.

Upon her arrival we meet the woman living there and her creepy son, who explains things to Samantha that the lights go off every six minutes to conserve energy, she shouldn't go to the 8th floor (that's Malestrazza's quarters, you see, and it's never cleaned), and whatever you do don't go on the roof! I would think that someone planning the demolition of a building would explain the logical deficiency of avoiding certain parts of it, but we understand that this is a horror movie and these goofy rules he's explaining are a set-up for freaky sequences that are to follow. There's also the issue of a few remaining people who lived in the building and who are not likely to appreciate Sam arriving to destroy it. The young boy also worries that Malestrazza will be offended by her plans.

I was reminded of the brilliant novel House of Leaves in a lot of things about the movie. Sam discovers enormous discrepancies between the blueprints and the actual measurements of the house, which in that book led to a fascinating and frightening series of events, but in the movie leads to the cheap and utterly witless third act. There is also a lot of throwbacks to Psycho in the relationship between the young boy and his mother in an isolated location. Sam even describes the building as being "like the Bates Motel, only bigger," and at one point the mother forbids her son to go near Sam, telling him that Sa could never take care of him the way she does. Creepy.

Ultimately we learn about an "ancient architectural belief" that provides the reason that Malestrazza killed people and walled them into his buildings (and also the reason why not one of the 27 buildings that Malestrazza built have ever been torn down). It gives the movie the feel of something with more thought in it that it actually has. I felt a little flicker of interest when this was revealed, but in retrospect it strikes me as little more than a screenwriters brainstorm.

I understand that Walled In is based on a novel, and I hope the novel is better than the movie. Books, especially horror books, are always better than the movie, ad if someone read the book and thought it was good enough to make into a film, it must have been better than this movie, because it has all the sign-posts of a weak horror film. It's full to the brim with cheap scares (notice the Screeching Cat Scare, which at least was made a little bit different but essentially is the same old thing, and my favorite, a scary rose scare. You have to see that one to believe it) and blatantly rips off a whole series of other horror movies. I'm curious what the movie would have looked like had director Gilles Paquet-Brenner never seen Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films. He even uses that "One, Two, Freddy's Coming For You" song several times. Real creative there, buddy.

I won't go into the details of the end of the film partly because I don't want to ruin it for you but mostly because it's so dumb that I don't want to bother spending my time explaining it. I will tell you one thing though. There's a particularly amusing scene where the boy accuses Samantha of thinking that he's nothing but a "crazy little boy." You gotta see this scene, man, it's hilarious. At the time that he says that to her, I won't tell you what he happens to be doing, but when you make a statement like that, it's generally not a good time to be acting like a crazy little boy.

What follows that scene is a third act that is not entirely without effect, but definitely one of the dumbest situations that I've seen in a horror movie in some years. It is so bizarre and makes so little sense that the movie almost becomes a mystery. Another mystery is why the thing got made in the first place, but sadly, after seeing the movie, I don't think I'm every going to be able to bring myself to read the book