Ceremony 666

This film was SOOOOO boring that I couldn't even watch it with the fast forward held down firmly all the way through.The demon on the box cover was cool as hell ,but you only saw it for a MOMENT and then it walked out of frame BACKWARDS!Full of bad acting and TERRIBLE direction this movie sucks.

This movie was a disappointment. It appears as if some film students got together, had some great effects ideas (eg, Satan costume) and not that bad a story idea. The problem came when the actors were just plain old, bad. For the rental price it is OK for something to watch to pass the time, but not great for parties.

I first saw "Ceremony" after my friend and I rented it at Blockbuster. We were looking for a good movie to get and were torn between "Something About Mary" and "Ceremony". Now "Ceremony" had a very cool cover (gothic lettering, big ol' demon on the front), so we naturally assumed that it was an awseome flick, which led to us renting it. I wish we got "Something About Mary". After the first 10 minutes of this snorefest we were about ready to throw the VCR out the window. I won't spoil the ending, because I was too confused by the uneven plot to know what happened (I also stopped paying attention mid-way through. Maybe that's why). To sum up, A very slow-moving film with bad acting, bad dialouge, and something that looks like grape jelly being used for blood; that is "Ceremony". So if you are considering seeing this movie, beware! It is not what you expect. They say, "Don't judge a book by its cover," and for "Ceremony", it's true (except it's a movie, not a book).

I'm not going to belabor how bad this movie sucks--the 3.3 star rating it currently has says that for me. Instead, I'm going to try to be somewhat constructive here. So, we have an el-cheapo film with amateur actors, shot almost entirely inside someone's house, but that doesn't mean it has to suck. The truth is you could throw a ton of money at this lame flick and it would still suck because the story sucks. So, working with what they had, how could they fix it? Well, from where I sit you have two choices: you can either have a well-written script that engages the viewer or you can fill it up with a bunch of nudity and violence and go for the shock value. I'm not trying to be snarky here, but those are your options when that is all you have to work with, however, this movie employs neither of those tactics so it is just bad, not even bad enough to be so bad it's good. Not worth your time.

The video box cover for this film looks great, featuring a big nasty Devil with white boiled-egg eyeballs and some pretty cool looking rams horns. The premise is even pretty interesting: a clockwork device that has been running for thousands of years is finally winding down. At the stroke of midnight, it will release an irritable fallen angel, and it is up to a group of devoutly religious students to keep it trapped within the mechanism for a few more thousand years.

Unfortunately, this film falls a few miles short of actually being good. The budget is substandard, the actors seem to have flunked out of drama school and the whole thing turns into a messy, sloppy, cheap looking splatter film. The Devil is still decently icky looking, but it doesn't get a lot of screen time. Instead, we get a possession scene featuring a giant tequila worm crawling down the throat of an annoying girl who has been tied up and unwisely (and conveniently) left alone in a dark room. Yeah, that's exactly what I would do if a demon was loose in MY house, uh huh. The ending is cheesy and not even kindly old Forrest Ackerman in a wheelchair can save this putrid mess.

I give this film 2 stars - one for the Devil make-up and one more for the original idea, which unfortunately goes nowhere and never develops. It's a shame because, in the right hands, this could have been a pretty good film with a cool new story to tell.