Impossible Monsters

The synopsis of "Impossible Monsters" is very intriguing - an ambitious professor becomes caught up in the murder of a participant in his sleep study, as the lines between dreams and reality blur. The movie has a pretty cool poster and just the right media quote on it. I'm telling You all this because those were the details that sold me and brought me to the big disappointment. If not exactly disappointing, then very underwhelming.

"Impossible Monsters" is, by all means, an adequate film, a decent directional debut effort. Director and writer Nathan Catucci promises a whole lot, mystery, twists and a warped reality, but the hyped up delivery never really comes through. The first half feels a little soapy - the intriguing themes of sleep paralysis and such get saved for later as we watch the characters dealing with their relationships and Nathan Catucci trying to web that all up into something mysterious. The second half delivers a bit more - more atmosphere, more questions and twists. Though the kind of twists that you smell long before you see them. The entirety of the characters, including the performances they're carried on, never really impresses or truly engages. Aesthetically, "Impossible Monsters" looks and sounds good, less stylish and ambitious than I was led to believe, but definitely above average on the technical side. A heartfelt compliment goes out to the original score, the one element that, in my opinion, helped setting mood the most. While my eyes could appreciate seeing the "Impossible Monsters", my brain got more numb than engaged, for the story leads nowhere unexpected, nor anywhere absurd or beautiful. The 84 minutes felt longer than they had any right to do.

There's an undeniable effort put into "Impossible Monsters", but the underwhelming feeling of never getting anything with 'weight' is what it leaves, so for me this movie landed right into the "painfully average" category. My rating: 5/10.

The acting was some of the worst I've seen in years. The two cops in this literally made me bust cry with laughter. It's almost as if someone went on Google, did some sketchy research on dreams and made a movie. You could tell in the trailer the acting might be bad, but the graphic scenes they show in the trailer are much more underwhelming inside the actually movie.

Very tenuous link to sleep paralysis, which has little to do with the plot of the movie and, at the end, I was left wondering what that had to do, if anything, with the film as a whole. It seems it was put in there just to add an extra layer of suspense in order to spice up what is in essence a rather dull movie. As for the ending. I couldn't even fathom a guess of what that was supposed to mean.

A dramatic thriller based on the very creepy subject of sleep paralysis proves to have some very disturbing dream sequences, and a generally unsettling mood overall. The pacing is a little erratic, sometimes all over the place, with a muddy story that may leave you behind if you aren't giving it your full concentration. And even if you are, it may still lose you a little bit. Not bad, but not really great either, and probably a bit forgettable. If it were just a bit scarier and perhaps focused more on the nightmare sequences and less on the characters' lives I think it would have made a bigger impact...but with good production value and decent acting forgiving its flaws, it's a 6/10.

The acting wasn't too bad. The story was confusing and the pacing didn't help. It was hard to watch until the end and then it pissed me off because it was so awful.