I vacillated over watching this -- the premise seemed interesting, but the reviews and ratings suggested that the execution didn't live up to the premise. I decided to watch anyway, partly because I prefer to decide for myself, partly because I have this hopeless optimism about premises that sound like something I'd enjoy.
It was..serviceable for a while. The gore seemed a bit gratuitous in the early going, but I held out hope that it would be explained in terms that made it indispensable, or at least logical. For at least the first hour, it seemed possible that everything that was happening would hang together once the twist/reveal/epic epilogue/whatever came. It didn't. Or, rather, the reveal was trite and poorly done even by the standards of triteness. It was one of those endings you could see coming a mile away and yet dismissed that possibility because the filmmakers surely wouldn't dip into that cliche well Yet they did, and poorly, leaving us completely baffled as to what *actually* happened, that is, what objectively took place. Because not only did it fail to explain the vast majority of the film's action, it failed to explain what Amy was doing during all of this, and what logic underlay the nature of the various aspects of the action. It answered maybe three minor questions and left the major ones unaddressed. It's not ambiguity if you don't even give us something to be ambiguous about.
The acting was...okay. Uneven, especially with the actress who played Jen, but okay, even if all the make-up in the world (and it certainly looked like they applied approximately all of it) couldn't disguise the fact that Danielle Harris, while still quite lovely, was at least 10 years older than her 30 year old character.
Someday I'll finally learn to stop letting my hopes for a good movie based on the synopsis triumph over common sense and experience. At least I got about an hour of ongoing hope out of this movie before it all fall apart. That's something, right?
