Dead Mary: Possessão

This is no classic, but it's a perfectly entertaining way to spend 103 minutes. It's definitely the best Canadian horror flick I've ever seen (actually, it might be the only one).

Seriously though, while the acting might not be Oscar caliber, it ranges from not offensively bad (Eve) to actually pretty good (Baker). And while a lot of movies in this sub-genre are full of characters you can't wait to see die (I'm looking at you, "The Breed"), I found myself rooting for the survival of a few in this one.

Sure, the premise of a group of young people stuck in a remote area battling evil has been done a million times, but that's because it's a fun horror sub-genre, and this is a decent entry. I really don't understand the confusion over the plot that many reviewers have mentioned--this is not a thinking man's movie and requires only a very basic level of consciousness to get it.

One last thing... I liked the ending! As I said before, if you're looking for a cinematic masterpiece, you'll be disappointed in "Dead Mary," but what are you doing in the horror section in the first place? If you're looking for a bit of mindless entertainment, "Dead Mary" will do the job.

Kim (Dominique Swain) and her boyfriend Matt (Jefferson Brown) have just broken up, but they travel together to a cottage nearby a lake to spend the weekend with their friends Eve (Marie-Josée Colburn), Dash (Michael Majeski) and his wife Amber (Reagan Pasternak) and Baker (Steve McCarthy) and his new girlfriend Lily (Maggie Castle). The atmosphere becomes heavy with the situation between Kim and Matt, and one of them suggests them to play "Dead Mary". Matt, Eve and Dash summon the evil witch repeating her name three times in front of a mirror with a candle. Along the night, Matt hears weird noises, is killed and returns to life, while part of the group is possessed by the fiend. Without knowing who is possessed, the rest of the group fights to survive.

"Dead Mary" is a mediocre movie. The urban legend of Bloody Mary that was brilliantly explored in "Candyman" in the 90's, now is used in a rip-off of "Evil Dead". There are many movies with "a group of friends that goes to a cabin in the woods and faces evil", like for example "Cabin Fever", which works. But "Dead Mary" is awful, with a boring beginning, a messy story where "Dead Mary" never shows up, and a ridiculous conclusion. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Dead Mary – A Possessão" ("Dead Mary – The Possession")

When you are trying to tread the same ground as a well-made classic that has all of its best elements in place, there are really only two possible outcomes. You can either do a good job and be compared to the original in somewhat flattering terms, or you can do a bad job and end up the joke of the industry. The latter is what happened to director Robert Wilson and his writers when Dead Mary rolled out onto home video. A big part of the problem is their inability to provide a proper undercurrent for the story, with no credible explanation for the film's events in sight. It does not matter how preposterous your story is on the surface. If you do not provide it with at least a small anchor in reality, you will lose your audience. For a good example of a preposterous story going to glory because its makers took the time to anchor it in some turf of reality, one need only look at such pieces as RoboCop, Ghostbusters, or Desperado. Dead Mary proposes a preposterous idea and does nothing to anchor its audience in its reality.

That would have been forgiven, or even mended, if the film had taken just a little bit of time to introduce the cast of characters and give them a hint of a personality. For a good example of this done right, one can simply go back to The Evil Dead again. Within the first half-hour, we are given subtle yet strong hints of who each character is and what they are like as people. Dead Mary's writers attempted to cheat this by grafting soap opera archetypes into the characters, and it unfortunately backfires. By the time the film goes into the gory payoff, all we know about these characters is who is married to whom, who is cheating on whom, who is upset with whom, and who failed to arrive. Outside of the parameters of this semi-outdoor trip that was done far better in The Evil Dead, we know so little about the cast of characters that caring about them is next to impossible. Half of the time, we do not even know their names. The other half of the time, their names have so little weight it would have been more effective to simply call them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Making it even worse is that the central premise is so vague and ill-defined that it ends up making less sense as time goes on. In The Evil Dead, our heroes wind up fighting one another because they have stumbled upon the results of an archaeological expedition that turned up secrets they could barely grasp the implications of. In Dead Mary, the heroes play a stupid game that was quite obviously culled from Candyman and given no mechanism of actuation. Quite literally, one moment our characters are having a dispute on what was meant to be an idyllic vacation, then the next they are regenerating destroyed flesh and doing bad David Vincent impersonations. It becomes such a non-sequitor that all of the impact is lost. Another comparison to The Evil Dead that Dead Mary cannot stand up to is the moment when we learn that Cheryl has been taken by something the group resurrected by accident. The dramatic buildup and payoff of The Evil Dead was arresting. Dead Mary is by comparison poorly-written and shot even worse.

Does this make the entire project a waste? Well, no, there are moments when the film does look like breaking out of its amateurish writing and becoming something more substantial. Dominique Swain and Maggie Castle do the best they can with a screenplay that gives them absolutely nothing to work with. One can see the frustration crossing Dominique's face as she struggles with staggeringly inept screen writing. When the film gets confused as to what it is trying to emulate and even attempts to borrow from The Thing, Dominique and Maggie slot into the important roles of that particular story nicely. Marie-Josée Colburn also does well trying to give her character a haunting or threatening vibe, but is undone by the fact that the screenplay tips its hand way too early, and makes the revelations to the rest of the cast so perfunctory that the audience is a solid hour ahead of the heroes. People despair of the constant-rewrite culture that pervades Hollywood, but films like Dead Mary demonstrate why most screenplays should be revised at least five times.

Another problem Dead Mary falls into is that it constantly needs to fade to black in order to jump from one character to another. For a film that supposedly takes place over the course of a night, this is not only unnecessary but serves to deflate the dramatic tension. Another area where The Evil Dead excelled was that with the exception of some very seamless cutaways, the entire thing achieves the feeling of taking place in real-time. The result is that by the time the hero emerges into a dismal morning sunrise, the viewer feels gobsmacked that all this mayhem and death took place over the course of one night. The final death scenes of the possessed characters left the audience in awe. In Dead Mary, the perfunctory execution of the one character we know to be possessed is edited so poorly and executed in such a who-cares fashion that it ultimately robs the film of any memory of dramatic tension. There is a reason why I keep comparing Dead Mary to other, better films. Namely, Dead Mary is so obsessed with what not to do that it ends up not doing anything at all, and the result feels more like a collection of unused footage than an actual film.

Dead Mary is very much a two out of ten film. It is so pedestrian in style that it ends up being neither good nor bad. It is simply boring.

The attempt of the director to make a horror movie lies flat on the ground.The ghost or horror element appears only for 2 very short instant,in fact the poster is more horrifying than the movie.

The central premise is so vague and ill-defined that it ends up making less sense as time goes on.In the movie it constantly needs to fade to black in order to jump from one character to another. For a film that supposedly takes place over the course of a night, this is not only unnecessary but serves to deflate the dramatic tension.

"Dead Mary" is a below mediocre movie. The urban legend of Bloody Mary that was brilliantly explored in "Candyman" in the 90's, now is used in a rip-off of "Evil Dead". There are many movies with "a group of friends that goes to a cabin in the woods and faces evil", like for example "Cabin Fever", which works. But "Dead Mary" is awful, with a boring beginning, a messy story where "Dead Mary" never shows up, and a ridiculous conclusion.

This movie was a disappointment on several different levels. As we first start in it's obviously going to be yet another horror movie about beastly and possibly a couple of decent young people heading out to do stupid things in the woods and on that note it played through.

First of all I must say that depending on which version (or region) of the movie you get, then the cover may or may not actually be properly depicting the contents of the movie. The DVD I got have a shot of the cabin with a hand sticking out of the ground on the cover, now that was proper to the movie. However, the cover that is used here on IMDb is the one that sort of sets up the movie for something more than it actually is.

Regardless, then "Dead Mary" was actually a rather alright horror movie, sort of think a mixture between "Evil Dead", "The Exorcist" and any of the number teenage horror movies out there, then you have a basic idea of what you are in for in "Dead Mary".

The story is about a group of young people coming together in the woods, in an old cabin, for the weekend. A weekend that is supposed to be about reunion, fun and partying. But fun and partying turns to dread and fear when the people start on playing the 'dead Mary' game, where they have to go alone into the bathroom, call out 'dead Mary' three times (can anyone say "Candyman" here?) and then apparently the spirit of a witch will appear. Something do shows up and the lives of the group are now in danger. One by one people start dying under strange circumstances, and people are not whom they used to be or appear to be. Who can they trust? But more importantly, will they survive the weekend?

I found the story to actually be alright, despite it borrowing heavily from other horror movies. Still, the movie turned out to be interesting enough and provide good entertainment. The mood and setting of the movie was really good, and you had a sense of isolation and dread in the movie, which was nice, because it helped build up the tension.

Personally, I found "Dead Mary" to be a step up from the usual teenage horror/slasher movies that have been flooding the horror scene for quite some years already. It was nice to see something aside from someone wronged coming back to wreck havoc and vengeance on the late teenagers who wronged him.

"Dead Mary" has a couple of great scare moments, but nothing that will make you jump out of the chair. What this movie is running on is the suspense and the way that it keeps you wondering whom is possessed and who isn't, who is telling the truth and who is lying. For that aspect, then the director, Robert Wilson, really did a great job.

There was actually a decent amount of blood in the movie, which I found great. But this wasn't really a slasher or gore movie, so it was just an added bonus.

The people they had on the cast list were great actors and actresses, and the people did great jobs with their characters. However, the ones that were carrying the movie were Jefferson Brown (playing Matt), Dominique Swain (playing Kim) and Steven McCarthy (playing Baker). They really put on great performances and made the movie come to life.

"Dead Mary" is a good horror movie that stays true to the old-school horror movies of the late 80's and early 90's, just with a pinch of "Evil Dead" thrown into the formula. If you enjoy horror movies and like to be kept in suspense where you are not fully sure about what is going on around you, then you should definitely check out "Dead Mary". Just remember to leave the lights on in your bathroom...