The Girl in the Photographs

After having just seen the other Oz Perkins-written 2015 horror film February, and adoring it, I was hoping for a similarly well-crafted film here, with a nuanced screenplay which dares to contribute to the horror genre in new ways. Got the opposite - an extremely low-concept, poor execution slasher. I hope he follows the path of that other film in the future.

A grocery store checkout clerk keeps having mysterious photographs of murdered and mutilated women left for her to find around her workplace and other locations. Seven of them so far. The cops think it is "art" so they don't bother doing absolutely anything about it (what?) at any point, even after the girl is stalked (what?). Then some famous photographer and his posse of models comes to town because he's "inspired" by these photographs, and wants to recreate them. Then slasher.

I'll just get the biggest problem out of the way - this slasher has absolutely zero tension. I feel like it tries to heavily borrow from better films, but achieves only lifeless recreations which fail to understand how to create tension. Most obviously this was clearly inspired by the Strangers, down to the masks. So expect a LOT of scenes that make zero sense if examined from a "why would anyone do this other than for the camera" perspective. Like the villains just lurking randomly in the background and appearing and disappearing and so on and so forth. On top of that, the setups are SO common that the viewer is always five seconds ahead of the characters in peril - you will be able to, with 100% accuracy, predict every single time a villain will appear and disappear in the background. Every, single, time.

The characters were supposed to be funny (I think), but weren't my cup of tea. The secondary cast were decent actors, just not given much to work with. The main actress just looked annoyed throughout the entire film. Her range was "very angry" to "only moderately angry". The villains were just awful. Were they going for farcical? They seemed to do random creepy things for the sake of it. It was just an amalgamation of one dimensional "gross" ideas to try to convince us of how deranged the characters are, which just made them comical and a parody.

The nail in the coffin was the final scene."Horror 101", obvious from the beginning, standard "last chill". This movie did not take itself seriously at all and it did not bode well for the concept. It wouldn't be a bad concept if developed further, but should have tried for a serious and tense tone, because it could have been far more interesting.

Upsides? Decent gore, and two or three funny lines hanging on for dear life in an otherwise mostly-witless sea of dialogue.

The trailer looked good. The premise was interesting. The actual film itself...well...I just kept hoping for it to end or at least provide SOME sort of creepy factors. This movie may work for some but true Horror and Thriller fans will be disappointed. If you can get past the obnoxious and facetious character of one of the main actors well you're definitely more patient and forgiving than me. He was absolutely AWFUL. Condescending...and much more. Horribly written character. In addition I was very discouraged by the police and how they handled certain situations. Finally this movie may as well be re-named "Masked Stabbers" trying in some way to perhaps be like Scream (but failing miserably). I am not sure how this film garnered 5/10...definitely beyond me. Pass.

If you are bored to death and you have no slightest idea what to do with yourself, then you could maybe consider watching this movie. Actually... no. Better observe your walls, there must be some interesting bug stains or something. I mean... something this much useless and unprovoked is rare to find...

3/10

...and even that much only because there are some cute girls in it.

I was intrigued when I heard about 'The Girl in the Photgraphs' because it had an interesting title and a potentially interesting premise, with a chance of some mystery in the story. The synopsis on IMDb reads: "A bored young woman in a sleepy community called Spearfish starts receiving photographs of brutally murdered young women. Are they real or staged? The culprit is either a serial killer or some creep with a sick sense of humour." Sounds interesting enough - that is until the first scene in the entire movie answers the question, which just so happens to be the only thing the film could have had going for it. From then on it is just an abysmal mess, not worth anyone's time or effort.

There are times where this film can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a horror movie or a romantic comedy. There is nothing wrong with taking the time to make your characters charming and likable but do it within the context of the movie. The uneven tone is so noticeable that it becomes incredibly off-putting and takes away any chance the film has to build any atmosphere or tension. In fact I can honestly say in the entire 95 minute runtime I never once felt the slightest emotion towards the movie. I was never worried for a character's safety, or charmed by the dialogue, or even for that matter got a single momentary fright. There is very little good here. Don't be fooled by a nicely made poster and a misleading synopsis. It's terrible.

Though I would not call this a masterpiece, I did find it interesting on the comical side. I know this is a horror movie, but I really could not resist the villains. You have to give it to them, they were a very comic duo. I have to tend to believe that they were the ones who had the true lead in this thing.

Unfortunately, besides that fact, the characters as always in horror movies tend to be painted as being particularly stupid -; especially the blonds. This movie did not fail to deliver on that side. They always tend to make ridiculous decisions. Obviously, I could enumerate the nonsensical actions that many of the actors had (except probably the couple in the bed) but that would make no sense.

I'm not really sure why the police kept staying in denial when it was obvious that somebody was killing people. In the real world, there would have been an investigation and on that side, I feel this was a huge miss by the movie. Nobody would make such realistic pictures of a crime without getting hooked by authorities and to my mind, being fund myself of fashion photography, I'm not sure I've ever seen something like that pass in reality. In that case, how did they miss that part in the movie?

I would recommend this for a quick laugh but nothing really too extraordinary to see there. I did give it a score slightly above the average review scores because I did not find it THAT bad and it was kind of enjoyable at the end because of the some of the very funny or borderline annoying characters in the movie.