La nonne

So you know when you're TOTALLY into a movie because the trailer was really good and the movie actually seems to be living up to what the trailer promised...and you're freaked out because it's genuinely creepy and impressed because it's kind of a way cooler movie than you'd expect to see in a direct to DVD movie these days and so you just can't wait for the climax because you need that pay-off... and then the thing goes limp in the last 10 minutes and there's no climax or rendering of where entire the story just went wrong...so you're totally let down and kinda peeved off...? That's what THE NUN did for me last night....

Everything Brian Yuzna (producer) touches lately seems to just end...not conclude...it just stops with some illogical reason for all the cool shite that just took up 90 minutes of your life....

Cool Fx. Decent acting. Moody. Scary at times. Sexy. Then it sucks at the end.

This week's surprise screening at GV turned out to be the horror movie The Nun (La Monja). Seriously, I think that horror movies should try and come up with more imaginative titles, even though the story's about the character as described in the title. Who knows, soon we'll have spinoffs like The Monk, The Priest, and others belonging to various religious sects.

The basic premise goes very simply, that a ghoul dressed up in a Nun garb (so that it can lay claim to the title) goes around killing ex-convent girls. There seemed to be some sort of conspiracy involved, as the daughter of one of the victims, Eva (played by an eye candy Icelandic Anita Briem), goes on to discover, with the help of a few good friends, like a rip off of I Know What You Did Last Summer (mentioned also, by the way).

So as the body count increases, it's a race against time for our emotionally scarred (aren't they always?) heroine to uncover the truth and save the day. Delving into the sins of the mothers, the movie did the unthinkable, that with a dream sequence as the introduction. I hate dream sequences as it's a pretty cheap technique if not done correctly, and there are a couple of them in the movie.

In part, the movie played at times like Ju-On gone wrong with the plenty of Dark Water references, and they could have retitled this Unholy Water, for the circumstances and plot points in the movie. However, there are plot holes abound, so don't be looking into the storyline too deeply. You'd come to expect the standard textbook twists towards the end about the sadistic nun, and sets which look like they can rival recent Thai horror movie Dorm.

The acting's pretty forgettable, with the cast speaking in perfect heavily accented English. And since most of them are pleasing to the eye, the story must weave in a love scene in the middle of a witch-hunt. What gives? Hello, got hantu, still got mood ah? Then again, the ghoul is a pretty cheap animated/SFX which has a built in AI of popping up every now and then, in various fashion, just to elicit screams from timid audiences. The characters also break every unwritten rule in the Do-Nots in horror lore, so you know and expect their just desserts.

Can you possibly enjoy this movie? Sure you can. Just ensure that you're watching it in a full house (should be easy, since local folks are suckers for anything remotely horrific), and laugh at those who are so jumpy they scream at every "frightening" scene. It's pretty fun, and adds to the atmosphere, besides what's going on the screen. Surround sound doesn't even come close.

Think of it as watching an episode of Scooby Doo without the wisecracks, and it's a pity that the gory moments in the movie had to be censored for a PG rating. Those could possibly have been the best bits, now left rotting on the censor's floor board.

Wow are you guys tough on this film. Granted it was "I know What You Did Last Summer" with a Nun. But the Nun was pretty scary and the film maintained a disturbingly eerie feel. There is something about the European sensibility that gives this kind of film a moody realism. It was a little odd that everyone had Spanish accents I thought the acting was pretty natural. The special water effects were pure trailer material. However, I felt let down by the end of the movie. It seemed rushed. And I'm sure it wasn't. This was also the work of a first time director. I thought he did a great job.

That said, I have seen far worse films.

I'm also dieing to see Yuzna's "What Lies Beneath". I enjoyed to book and was sorry to see his film isn't available on DVD.

(2005) The Nun/ La monja HORROR

Low budget type of story line based on the original story by Jaume Balagueró that involves a sadistic nun who used to do a bunch of terrible things to her students, suddenly the story jumps to the current time with unexplained deaths happening with those same students except that each of them had grown older. At this point, viewers are oblivious how the nun ended up not doing those things anymore. With more twists and revelations exposed, and an ending that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Interesting idea which eventually loses steam and credibility as film progresses.

There aren't enough horror movies featuring nuns. In fact, this is the first one I have seen. I was really hoping for something good, but I got a Spanish film that cut out the middleman and made a Hollywood remake as the original film. Sounds complicated, but it's not hard to comprehend if you think about it. Hollywood cannot remake this film as it has already been done.

Now, Icelandic beauty Anita Briem, in her first film, and Belén Blanco (The Whore and The Whale) make this film worth the time spent, but it could have been so much more.

That is not to say that the elevator scene wasn't great, but we've seen this film over and over without the nun. That's not enough to make it worthwhile, and, as for expected nudity in a horror flick, this one had nun.