Lemon Tree Passage

Okay so I'm forced to write a real review as there are only 1 or 2 which are from someone close to the movie crew. So this movies might be OK if you'r a teen male under 16 and you saw less than 100 movies in your life. If you aren't then don't bother. it's a pure waste of time. Why ? well all the cliché and stereotype are here. The funny thing is one guy starts telling a story " on a dark and stormy night" and they reply : "what a bunch of clichés"..Oh irony :) It takes too long to develop. Just the 2 first minutes perspire bad student movie. It's a copy of a copy of a copy of a bad movie.. no imagination just the kind of movie you do in school to learn how to direct and place cameras. But This movie is not made to be shown anyway it's one of those project that are paid by subvention so the crew is paid doing it and then no matter it does 10 or 1 million entries they wont get more money anyway. It's just excuse to get public money and have a salary doing something. In France that kind of system exist as well the result is 83% of produced movies have less then 10 000 viewers. concerning the scenario well , one can write the synopsis in 3 minutes. that's the kind of story you already saw thousands of times , nothing new here. a big AVOID tag !

If I may say, this movie is nothing but scary and shocking images.

The time-line goes all over the place, screenplay makes no sense, scenario was appalling.

Basically no story that makes sense.

This movie is an insult to common sense.

That't about it.

To rectify this basic flaws would seems impossible to be done. Maybe with a believable story-line, retaking of some of the scenes, an just about OK movie can still come out of this mess.

But then again, what do I know. I never made a movie before.

The fact is, I can't enjoy this movie. Maybe you can...

Austrlian horror films have a good track record (at least in my book). The best ones like 'Wolf Creek' however don't rely on the supernatural. The Austrlian people and their country are very dangerous and can make for great characters, especially in horror. 'Lemon Tree Passage' relies far too heavily on the supernatural, more than any film should. It starts off as a story about an urban legend based on a long strip of road and by the end is something else entirely (what I'm not exactly sure). The writing is so poor throughout that it's almost impossible to get a grip on exactly what is happening and why.

There aren't a lot of frights at any stage of the movie. The opening scene is bizarre and poorly directed and things don't get any better from there. From a very early point it becomes hard to care about the fate of any of the characters. The only one with any personality isn't in it for long and the rest really have nothing going for them. There's no time spent creating any tension is any scene and the suspension of disbelief is far too great to ever buy into (or care) about the story that's trying to be told here. A real misfire.

The primary failing of this movie is a lack of communication. There's a lot of great atmosphere and sound design -- I found myself legitimately creeped out by a couple of scenes.

The problem is the movie is too in love with its own mystery, to the point where up until the last ten minutes, you're not quite sure what's going on. There's no identifiable villain, no motive, just a bunch of seemingly unrelated events mixed with hallucinations, flashbacks, and generic jump scares.

You can't ever quite be sure what's really happening. In some movies that's a benefit, but Lemon Tree Passage really could've thrown the viewer a bone earlier in the movie. Without it, a lot of this feels like nonsense. Occasionally spooky nonsense, mind you, but still nonsense. It gets boring when you aren't provided a reason as to why anything is happening.

The answer to the movie's great mystery has almost zero payoff, too. It hardly even feels like an answer, and is more of an excuse to have a somewhat non-sequiturial slasher flick.

It did make for marginally fun riffing with friends, but even then, it was largely just a lot of exclamations of "WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING?"

The American Maya (Jessica Tovey), Amelia (Pippa Black) and her brother Toby (Tim Pocock) are spending vacation in Australia. The meet the locals Geordie (Tim Phillipps) and Oscar (Andrew Ryan) on the beach and Oscar tells a ghost story at the campfire. He tells that a ghost of a motorcyclist appears at the Lemon Tree Passage intersection when a car with teenagers speeds up at the spot. They decide to go to the location to see the ghost with tragic consequences.

"Lemon Tree Passage" is a horror movie with a story that is a senseless mess. It is impossible to understand the plot that begins with the ghost of a married motorcyclist and ends with the fiend of a raped girl that was murdered. Is Sam the older brother of Geordie? Why the evil ghost seeks revenge against the teenagers and not only against Sam? Why Maya is connected and possessed by the evil spirit? There are so many questions to be made that better off not waste time watching this flick. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "A Lenda Negra" ("The Black Legend")