Open 24 Hours

I'm a sucker for a realistic (as far as horror movies go at least) horror movie set in a very creepy location almost exclusively. 'Open 24 Hours' checked those boxes. A deserted gas station on a cold, stormy night will do just nicely. That's a great place to start from, but then you have to have an interesting premise with some remotely likeable characters that I will give a damn about. The film gets pass marks on those points narrowly. The premise was a stretch, but if you buy into it it works well enough. The characters were surprisingly strong. The main character 'Mary' was supposed to have just come out of prison, and she was nowhere near hardened enough to have done that, however I think that was important because it kept her likeable enough that I cared what her fate would be. The supporting cast were serviceable too.

There are a lot of hallucination/dream scenes in the film and it can have you asking yourself exactly what type of movie you're watching. Are you watching a girl lose her mind, or is there a genuine threat? Or is it both? Until the movie clears that up it can be a little hard to settle into exactly what you're watching for a while there.

The film's finale is its biggest strength. It was a surprisingly well put together sequence. There is some very heavy violence later in the film too, so be prepared for that if you need to be. I had a better time with 'Open 24 Hours' than I expected to. I would call it a pleasant surprise and say it is worth a look.

Decent horror is not that easy to make. So when a small (budget) movie like this comes along, some will probably cherish it more than others. Horror is always something that is fascinating, whether you are appalled by it or drawn to it. You experience something through the eyes of the protagonist and depending on your level of attachment, you go for the fuill ride or just lean back and enjoy whatever happens on screen.

Although enjoy might be the wrong word in some cases. And this is one of them. There is more than a bit of suspense here. And there is some brutal killings. For a slasher normal and obviously since this is a movie, you can't hold it against it. If that floats your boat, you will get what you bargained for. The movie is more than decent overall

Says the girl 5 minutes after hallucinating and taking tablets that stop said hallucinations immediately. A girl who has apparently spent time in prison yet looks and acts like a 16 year old. A parole officer who walks in to someones house and shoves them around. All in the first 15 minutes. Off.

I think this deserves better than a 5. Okay, so it's not the most original movie I've ever seen, but it was still done pretty well. The acting was great (Brendan Fletcher is terribly underrated IMHO) and it kept me entertained. Also some really good gore, if that's your thing.

"Open 24 Hours" is a gory one-location, slasher-like, mystery-in-delusion indie horror, working decreasingly well on those levels in that order. Overall, it proved to be an all-around okay fourth horror feature from Padraig Reynolds, an indie director who seems to love the genre and his role in it.

Mary (Vanessa Grasse) has been through a lot, having escaped from the life together with a serial killer, and is now trying to start anew, still fighting trauma, paranoia and delusions. She lands a well necessary job in a remote gas station as a nightshift clerk, a place where all that can go wrong, will go wrong. The story, written to twist and turn, in the end turns out rather conventional as most of theories that came to mind took a turn to nowhere. The line between Mary's delusion and reality is continuously tried to be blurred, and everything ends in as much conclusion as in ambiguity, but in either case feeling a little underwhelming. In other words, "Open 24 Hours" 'fizzles out' towards the end as the second half gradually favors simpler tropes and actionable filler.

On the other hand, all is well in the horrors taking place in the gas station, for the entire cast provides rather nifty little performances, with the highlight inarguably belonging to Vanessa Grasse. Another satisfying and consistently good aspect of "Open 24 Hours" is its aesthetic coating, built from creative, handsome cinematography and a solid effort by the FX and make-up team. Though perhaps not in excessive amounts, gore hounds will find their desert served extra bloody. On the matters of sound, in my opinion the original score didn't really have an extraordinary touches, as it reminded lot of the musical palette used in a multitude of genre flicks. If musical scores can be described as cliché, this one kind of is.

While the set bar of technical qualities of "Open 24 Hours" never seem to diminish, the substance, or story, on a certain level, does. All in all Padraig Reynold's newest hooray in horror is an entertaining (enough) and effortful indie piece, flaws and some lesser turns included. My rating: 5/10.