dana-kellish

Kirk Cameron takes a Yuletide dump on the screen is the most charitable thing I can say about this dreck. It's dull, preachy, ridiculously inaccurate with regard to history, inconsistent with its message, incompetent in technical matters, and an all-around unpleasant cinematic mess. One can easily grasp the emptiness of this film by watching only the credits, which mainly serves to pad out the film by including an idiotic blooper real, outtakes (one is left to wonder how it was decided which individual nuggets of cinematic dung should be included in the film as opposed to those that were left on the floor), and various other inanities. Worst, the film completely misses its own point.

Cameron has blamed "atheists" and "haters" for the bottom-of-the-barrel reviews this pile has garnered, but he gives those groups far too much credit. It would be difficult to imagine an atheist producing on purpose what this crap fest did by, one assumes, accident.

No need to go into too many details. It's too long for what it wants to do. It's slow. It's dull. It's ludicrous. The characters are ridiculous (despite the fact that a horrible smell coming out of a disgusting hole in the wall is mentioned repeatedly, at no point do the two residents of the apartment even bother to mention it to the landlord, an actor who seems to be doing a bad John Malkovich impression). It's clumsy (a character begins a relationship with woman she meets, who is promptly forgotten and never heard from again. The characters you expect to live do, and the ones you imagine will die do, in fact, die. It contains precious few scares of any sort, psychological or physical. It is entirely - entirely - predictable, without a single original thought or idea thrown in. The adversary is mostly unseen, never properly described, lacks motivation, and is way too easily defeated.

I'm the sort who rarely allows himself to turn off even a bad horror film, but I wish I hadn't even started this one. Seriously, it's not any good.

The filmmakers have confused artsy with blandness. There are a couple of horror-worthy scenes, but that is all, and the fact that you have to wade through the muck until 85% of the movie is over makes it unworthy of the effort. I love movies that build slowly, but the payoff has to be worth it. In this case, it's not.