Spoken

If you're into indie film then you know not to expect a Hollywood veneer. And as far as indie horror movies go, this one is a pretty decent outing. I'll be interested to see where this first-timer's career goes next.

After a series of strange attacks in their town, a group of students discovers that their college campus is being invaded by a swarm of vicious insects, but when the attacks lead to something far more sinister going on they learn the situation has ties to one of their own's past and must try to stop it.

This was a highly troubled genre effort. When this one works best is when there's a series of strong supernatural attacks that are quite prominent throughout here. The concept of the curse at play, ushering in the Biblical concept of speaking things into existence the way God offers his bounty to those who offer it to the world, takes a pretty unique and creative concept and runs with it. That causes the few attacks of the creatures jumping on victims and biting at them resulting in the bystanders being forced into action to remove the creatures and then engage in massive stomping parties to kill off the ones left around which has some fun creature feature action throughout. Even with the later scenes showing the effect the curse has over them and how it brings out the various body-morphing that looks somewhat creepy in concept, these here are really all that hold this one up. There are some big issues at stake with this one. The main drawback on display here is the films' rather obvious Christian message that overwhelms the horror aspects present. The fact that the entire film is spent trying to moralize the concept of goodness overcoming darkness through actions and words that this preachifying interrupts the overall genre attributes. The film stops itself cold to focus on the positivity expressed through religious teachings and how she especially tries to get something remotely resembling intensity or thrills in the scene it drops this entirely to focus on some moral principle or religious teaching that doesn't have any impact on the film as a whole. Some scenes stop dead in the middle of their horror attack to reference some kind of religious teaching or moral and there's very little that's frightening about the film due to that. On top of that, there are some problematic areas within the film's structure itself. The idea of the demonic entity attacking them because of their words is never explored in-depth since most of that is just inference without concrete proof, much like the true identity of the female spirit controlling everything that has very little explained about it. The whole concept of the students going crazy in quarantine and questioning everything is such an irrational jump to conclusions that making some of the accusations they do offers absolutely illogical statements that are hard to make us fall in line with their line of thinking, while the whole idea of the random students being interviewed on a national television service without the cooperation and presence of the school during the experience is just laughably incorrect and unrealistic. Which just makes the film look amateurish more than anything. The other factor to be had with the film is the utterly obvious low-budget quality that runs throughout here. The fact that it was filmed during a pandemic with the occasional masked student while others are on their own yet are clearly not following the kind of mandates that would be in place for such events creates a highly disjointed and distracting experience. That carries over into the special effects work which is laughably poor, ranging from bargain-basement CGI that doesn't have any sense of realism or connection to reality with their inability to connect with anything around them, further destroying the impact of the horror scenes in this one. With blood splatter flashing on the walls that look no better and dream sequences that feature ludicrous computer-graphic imagery that makes this look even cheaper, these issues hold this one back overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

I can't believe this site makes you have to use 600 count characters in order to do a one line review so that stupid hat in the first scene should at least earn somebody a beating and then non-matching bag one good quick slap across the face OK and now I have to get to 350 more characters. In order to say something about a freaking hat. What is wrong with this whole set up? There should be a minimum characters of 100 that's it. This is just stupid and a waste of everybody's time at this point but I can't give up because I only have 82 characters left to go so I guess you guys can go F yourself because this will be the last F in review that I leave on this Site.

Christian made films tend to be made laughably poor. This is no exception. B-movie horror films are often, at the very least, fun on a cheesy level. Christian movies, unfortunately, aren't cheesy. They tend to be pandering, over the top with inserting bad and faulty arguments for "Christian morality." Beliefs aren't what make a movie terrible, however.

There's multiple antagonists/monsters at work, and don't make sense. The basic premise is explained, but the execution severely lacking. This film was clearly made during the pandemic, as some actors chose to wear masks during the pandemic, while others didn't. It makes an odd experience, as some of the establishments the scenes take place in, would've likely had mandated masks.

The camera work is shaky and low quality, the editing is often choppy, sometimes even in the middle of a continuous shot (multiple takes edited together.) The audio mixing is terrible in a few scenes, though I will have to commend how often the spoken dialogue is consistently audible throughout most of the film. A few moments are murky and difficult to hear, but thankfully they're not many.

The special effects range from practical Halloween decorations made by high schoolers, to computer generated effects made by high schoolers. It's probably the most distracting part of the movie. I think they stole some blood animations from a gif on an angelfire website.

The acting goes from pretty terrible to pretty okay. Oddly enough, some of the acting from the "sinful" characters are the most natural. Unfortunately, they're not safe from awkward dialogue in a few scenes.

Overall, this movie was probably made on a budget of a few pizzas and beers, and maybe $20. Making a movie can be tough, and I hope these people had a good time making it, because other than laughing at it with your friends, there's no real redeeming value.

Low budget yes, still they get the most that they could and that was obvious. There are a few unmistakable technical flaws with this one, but it's still ambitious in supernatural effects, with some solid acting in there, and the end message is uplifting as well.