La Chambre des oubliés

Oh yeah, we know the type. September and January releases are generally known as movie dump months, after a busy period of cinema releases. A lot of the films released in this time period are films studios just needed to stick in to release. Generally these films are not good. The Disappointments Room does not go against the mold. After I watched the film I was kind of hoping I didn't as it pretty much offered nothing worthwhile during its entire duration.

The film is about a mother (played by the lovely Kate Beckinsale), her son and husband who move into a house where creepy occurrences take hold. She soon discovers a "disappointments room" in the attic where children with special needs or deformities were locked up. The spirits of the past start haunting her and she has a hard time separating reality from this new world she unlocked. Its a typical horror premise. Can I even call this horror? There isn't one scare in the film. Nothing that will stay with you. There aren't even any jump scares. In this day and age you'd expect something startling from a horror film but nothing really ever comes. As the film progresses you want to stomach less and less of it. If you've seen as many horror films as I have, you want something original, ambitious, or frighteningly entertaining. Unfortunately, this rarely happens.

I love Kate Beckinsale. She's an ageless beauty who I love watching on screen. I'd say she's the only reason you'd want to check this film out. She needs to pick better stuff for herself. She's been in some bad stuff but shes just wasted here. The guy who played her husband seemed like a caricature, his line delivery seemed so forced. He was basically the prototypical husband who doesn't see whats going on. Lucas Till was an entirely useless and creepy in the wrong kind of way character. I don't like the idea for the film but there could have been better delivery. Wish-washy editing of a bunch of "scary" images jumbled together is not enough to be memorable.

I know its my fault for getting sucked into this (damn you sexy Kate Beckinsale!) but as an avid film lover I'm always willing to give everything a chance in search of finding an inspired work. There's no inspiration here. Just a tired picture filled with nothing essential. You'll find scarier things in your day to day life than this mediocre effort. Skip it. There's too many puns I can do with the title of this film to convey how bad it is but I'll save you all the torture.

4/10

The Disappointments Room is a disappoi...

See what I did there? I delivered the exact line you expected only I half-a**ed it. That in a nutshell is The Disappointments Room; it sets itself up to deliver nothing but the bare minimum and then doesn't even deliver on that. I automatically assumed this film was less than a blip on the radar. A small budget, small minded, small expectation snoozefest comparable to this year's The Other Side of the Door (2016). So imagine my surprise when the credits revealed the movie was directed by D.J. Caruso, the same guy who made Disturbia (2007). What the heck man? What the actual heck?

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns itself with a small family of New Yorkers who have moved to the American South to renovate an old antebellum mansion. While touring the grounds Dana (Beckinsale) our intrepid architect, notices a part of the house that's not in the actual blueprints. She prods further, locating the key to the room and deciding what the hay; let's open it up. What she doesn't know is the room also hides secrets that may anger the mansion's ghostly inhabitants and test the limits of her sanity.

The film strains mightily to fit every basic haunted house cliché. They include but are not limited to: ghosts standing behind their victims, toys magically appearing, elaborate apparition flashback mode and pets prematurely meeting their demise. Those clichés are then complimented with the sloppiest of editing and laziest of jump scares providing a movie completely lacking atmosphere. What's worse is this faded out dollhouse of a movie comes complete with a boring assemblage of shallow traits and neuroses masquerading as characters, which are thrown about with little regard for perspective, personality or motivation.

The most laughable of these paltry characters is Kate Beckinsale as Dana, whose lip-quivering mother in emotional recovery rings egregiously false. She saunters through scenes looking perturbed and has her share of bad dreams which is to be expected. Yet when the film reveals possible psychosis and carelessly lumbers towards a splashy confrontation, it's clear Beckinsale is drowning in a cesspool of offensively bad schizophrenia tropes.

This movie was not fun to watch...no surprise there. But it's also no fun to review. There's nothing resembling the ponderous hubris of Warner Bros's DCEU or the desperate "love me, please" attitude of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). There's no hilariously bad reasoning like in God's Not Dead 2 (2016) or drive-by bellicose like in 13 Hours (2016). The Disappointments Room is the movie equivalent of flat skunk beer. Any processes that were once teaming with life are now dead and baking in the sun, making your patio smell like cat p***.

Nothing happens in this film. There are no consequences to sift through, no conclusions to be drawn, no lessons to be learned. If the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference, than the fact that I left this movie feeling nothing should be a testament to just how bad this thing is.

For me the movie seems to suffer mostly from it trying to be two things without being really good at being one thing.

I went into the movie expecting a ghost story. What I ended up seeing is this some sort of psychological thriller staring Kate Beckinsale. She plays a architect who moves into a new house in the country with her family in order to get over the lost of a child, when she discovers a previous owner also lost their child on the same day and are hunting the room that they kept this child, who was a deformed girl born to a well to do family that wanted to keep their shame under wraps.

Kate Beckinsale does a really good job at playing a woman distressed over loosing a child. Most movies don't usually show this part of the break down, as her character develops a drinking habit, starts looking at her husband differently, to the point that a new man has a chance to interfere with the relationship, and she's becoming distance from the child she still has, in most movies this happens before that family moves into the house, but hear it actual seems to be happening during.

What takes away from this performance is the uneven dual plots with the ghost of their new home hunting Beckinsale's character, driving her crazy by putting ideas into her head about her feelings towards her dead child.

Having two movies in one can sometimes work (Like it did in From Dust Still Dawn), but here I feel the filmmakers never were quite sure about what they wanted the movie to be, which really effected it poorly.

I had high hopes for the first half of this movie, but it just falls into a jumble in the last half. So many unanswered questions; a random kite, a random carpenter,etc..

If you want to see a classic with a similar story line, but done much, much better, check out The Changeling, bone chilling Canadian movie from 1980 with George C Scott. Don't be fooled by it's age, it's scary. You can even see it on youtube for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVttK509_JI .....it's basically everything this movie is trying to be except....you know, it makes sense.

Long shelved (filmed in 2014, unreleased until 2016) this cannot decide if it wants to be a haunted house flick, a psychological thriller, family drama, or a routine slasher movie, as a couple, still reeling from the death of their infant daughter, relocate, with their young son, to a remote mansion, for unexplained reasons.

Weird things begin happening immediately, but the film implies it may all be in wifey's mind. The discovery of a hidden room, and a black dog prowling the grounds takes the plot into generic possession/ haunting territory, but dead daughter subplot takes it into tragedy/ family drama territory. We are introduced to who I believe was intended to be the token psychic woman, who disappeared as quickly as she appeared, which lead me to wonder why she was even there. Twice the film tried to bring a third party/ love interest into the plot, before dropping one completely, and killing the other, without anything further being mentioned about him.

This entire film is like that, with seemingly only the beginning of its plot threads being explored, then dropped entirely. The film never climaxes, so much as it just stops, with nothing remotely close to closure to any of its numerous plot threads.

Well acted, and there is enough atmosphere in the Gothic home, but whole chunks of the plot seem to have been edited out prior to release, giving the film an unsatisfactory, unfinished feel.