Punch

The visuals in the movie are actually good, but the rest is so bad it doesn't matter by the end. Killer is hard to understand at times with the electro-voice box, characters don't react as they should to events in front of them, and the kills are all boring except for the one with the redhead on the dock. Ending was puzzling and an attempt at a twist I guess. The twist was it didn't make sense or work at all. End credits say 'Mr. Punch will be back' so the makers seemed pretty confident they made a franchise starter. Um, no. It's nice that the friends of the crew gave the movie 8s out of 10, but watch it and you'll want to have a little talk with them afterwards. In the end, I watched this on Tubi, so free streaming. I still want my money back.

I would rather be punched than have to sit through this again. The sound guy for this must have lied in his resume or maybe it was just something that went wrong. Whatever the cause the sound was muffled and it made it difficult for me to make out most of the dialogue. The location and the location shots were good. The lead actress seemed capable the actress that played the mother was chewing through the scenery ( a bit over the top ) . We have seen this story before and done better. If only the sound was better but it wasn't. Less than 90 minutes but felt like 2:30 . The one thing I liked was the ending . The ending was a nice twist but not enough to redeem the film.

If you can get past the atrocious script/dialogue and some wooden acting, you're still left with a film that isn't sure if it's a seaside-town drama or a horror film. The first 50 minutes is more of a seaside teen drama, not a horror.

It comes across like it was written by a 14-year-old for English homework, with an assumption that using a scattergun approach of throwing in out-of-place swearing, references to TikTok, Instagram, knife-possessing teens, wokeness, gentrication, hippie/hipsters, veganism, a male and female gay couple, and drug taking makes it relevant and cool.

Really it just makes it laughably forced and ridiculous, it's like they've gone down a checklist and thrown it all in for no reason.

Visually it's nicely shot but unfortunately that doesn't make up for the dull schizophrenic storyline, the hilarously bad dialogue and the ridiculousness of events and conversations that unfold.

Nobody seems to question why there's a guy walking around in a "scary" mask with a bloodied baseball bat, they're instead all super friendly with him and even recording him on their phones; at one point a girl watches her friend getting killed but instead of running away waits around to be next, another keeps shouting her boyfriend's name while trying to hide from the killer, to name just some of the eye-roll inducing script-writing.

There's a particularly comedic performance by two policeman, one of which doesn't seem to care that the girl has a massive bloody handprint on her hoodie, and his partner that after seeing him gets bludgeoned just gets back in his police car and drives the killer off in his passenger seat like nothing has happened.

The identity of the killer was obvious and the reason for all the killing was at least consistently stupid/ridiculous.

As a horror fan I'm adept at suspending my disbelief, but it's so ridiculous even that's not possible. Especially the hilariously stupid ending.

Give it a watch if you think I might be wrong, but don't be surprised if you come out of it wanting the 81 minutes of your life back.

No pun intended - actually this has quite a few of those. It is not called punch for nothing .. though I reckon you could bat your life on something else too ... did I spell something wrong? I think not ... another pun might be something you just witnessed.

But enough of my weirdness, let's get into the weirdness of the movie. That plays with its location - a friend of mine was raised in a small town like the one we see here. And I reckon there could be more movies like this one - even from the same director. And maybe some of the cast - as in sequels, prequels and all that (not sure about going to space, which was suggested during the Q&A at the Frightfest screening I attended) ... or Ibiza .. though I imagine it would be fun to shoot there and would be quite the different take (again no pun intended).

The actors were nice - well I think good would be a more apt word/description. There is a darkness here and it is not so much the time of day (night) it was shot. Can you dig what the movies does? And where it ends up? That actually may be the biggest issue with the movie ... or its biggest draw ... depending on how you feel about it .. it won't leave you cold (another pun?) that's for sure ...

Saw this today at the Bournemouth horror movie film festival "screams by the sea" Loved it. I wont spoil it other than to say it builds into a fantastic movie with some great twists along the way. I thought the cinematography was spot on, some great drone shot and performances by the actors. It showed a very bleak looking dying northern seaside town and the reality of living in a place like that. The killer was genuinely disturbing, my only negative, the way the audio was mixed (or maybe it was the speakers at the venue) you could only understand about 30% of what the protagonist was saying. Recommended.