A Dangerous Place

I made the effort to register, just to write this review. I have watched many films, some good, some bad,some unwatchable, but this one opens up a whole new category, i can only describe it as unbelievable, this has to be the worst film i have ever seen. As one of the reviewers has said, the only way this could have any positive reviews, is if the cast wrote them, and as there are so few, it would seem they couldn't be bothered either, as it was so bad. If there were any redeeming features, i failed to see them, in so much, that the final four minutes were just laughable. In summery, avoid this like the plague, or like me, you may have to join a review site, just to vent your spleen.

This is a pretty good movie. Not great, but exciting enough. There are plenty of scary moments, and of course the urgent tone and frenzied editing of the various news outlets. Weird lighting, strange angles and shaky cameras add to the mood in the scary situations.

And we are given many different possibilities about the cause of what's going on. But we always suspect there is one main reason. We just don't know the details.

But it's not all a tense thriller. There are sweet family moments, and even a role for faith, as the family's priest helps with honoring Will.

And there is room for occasional comedy, like that huge pile of what looks like a week's worth of celebrity fan mail, but is really eight months of regular mail.

Kristen Dalton does an okay job. Claire has to be strong, but she falls apart occasionally. She's no superwoman, which is fine. She isn't necessarily a person of faith, but she is open to the idea of relying on a higher power.

I could have done without all the blood, but I guess that's how you know people are sick.

It's worth seeing.

I could only watch the first 15 minutes of this film before giving up. The story and acting is fine - the problem is pacing and cinematography. The dialog from actor and from scene to scene moves at lightning speed making it unwatchable. It seems the director was trying to squeeze a 2 hour film into 90 minutes ? I felt as if the films play speed had been increased !? Meanwhile the cinematography was very poor - too many shots too close to the actors faces.

It happens only rarely, very rarely I might add, that a movie turns out to be so utterly boring and uninteresting that I have to give up on it and turn it off. "A Dangerous Place", however, turned out to be one such movie.

The story, as far as I made it into the movie, is about a woman who apparently lost her husband in the World Trade Center tragedy, but he has come back as a ghost. The woman is not the mother to her child that she should be, and is more devoted to her work than her family. And a deadly outbreak of Tubercolosis runs rampant.

To me there was absolutely no coherent red thread in the storyline, and it seemed like it was a heap of mere random clips put together to attempt forming a movie. It just didn't really make much sense most of the time.

As for the acting in the movie, well I wouldn't exactly say that the performances were poor or bad, but they just weren't overly impressive either. None of the performances managed to leave a lasting impression on me. But I can't hardly say that any of the performances that I witnessed were helping the movie along in any great way either.

I think I made it about halfway into the movie, because I had to give up and find some other movie to watch out of sheer boredom and lack of interest in the storyline portrayed in "A Dangerous Place". And I can honestly say that I have no intention of attempting to finishing it either, it was just that devoid of appeal.

So a movie with a 2.8 rating has 22 reviews, all giving it 8, 9, or 10 out of 10 stars and filled from beginning to end with soapy blind praise for the film and over-the-top fawning for the film makers. Oh and surprisingly all of these rather generic and utterly useless reviews have 100% usefulness ratings.

But the really odd part about all this is the fact that all 22 users have only a single review to each of their accounts and no message board posts. So they happen to have no interest or strong feelings about any movies except this one--amazing! Well, this is either the best indie film ever made or a film so bad, by filmmakers so incompetent and with so little professional integrity, that they actually resorted to such a tactless and blatant astroturf job.

And it should be no surprise to anyone that it's not the former. This movie is really, _really_ bad (even worse than the trailer). Paying barely literate people to spam positive reviews for their film on IMDb and YouTube is pretty much the only way they can trick anyone into watching this rubbish. But they couldn't even do that right.

What they really should have done was use all that money to hire some professional writers and film makers to make an actually decent film for them.

P.S. See the message board discussion entitled "Reviews" for more anomalies.