The Thin Man

Creepy movie from some promising young filmmakers. The ending, as I recall, was pretty disappointing, but up until then it was surprisingly scary. Definitely not just another ultra-low-budget found footage movie. The Redshaw brothers know how to build tension and instill a sense of dread, and I look forward to seeing more movies from them in the future.

I'd really like to watch it again so I could write a more detailed review, but it doesn't seem to be available on Amazon or Netflix. I saw it on demand back when I had cable, and haven't been able to find it anywhere since.

I got to 7 mins 46 seconds. I couldn't take the animal cruelty, kicking that poor toad and the horrible sound it made in pain, and lying there on its back. It looks real, and nothing in the wee bit of end credits states no amimals were harmed. This is acceptable in Australia? It's sick. The redshaws are vile.

I was nice and overlooking the whole "struggling Youtubers" angle to it, combined with the protagonists being a pack of obnoxious idiots, and rather well taken in by what amounts to, most of the time, a rather straight-forward little "found footage" horror movie made on an extremely low budget.

The film claims the footage was all found in 2010, which puts it a bit at odds with the whole concept of "YouTubers" since that wasn't as much of a thing. It's not entirely big of an issue or even in any way inaccurate, but the way in which these guys seem to be planning stuff out feels slightly anachronistic.



It was tense and rather scary in certain places, but it completely self-sabotages by giving itself away with the random on-screen static and distortion any time the "Thin Man" or anything related to it shows up literally anywhere on screen, even as a tiny blip of a shadow in some corner of the screen.

Moments build up slowly to some bits of scares and jumpscares, then are immediately telegraphed with the annoying static, basically warning you of an impending jumpscare before the actual jumpscare . It does this nonstop and it essentially kills the film. What ever you can say for what went right with the film (because a whole lot of it is ordinary, predictable, and cliché), the atmosphere it had maintained ends up ruined by the constant static telegraphing every spooky moment.

Aside from that, there's one thing that really irritated me to no end. I've watched a whole bunch of horror movies, bad horror movies, low budget horror movies, bad low budget horror movies, including some with utterly atrocious acting. Something about bad acting is almost like an art form, with some people trying so hard and failing so miserably, and others just managing to perfect an awful tone without much effort.

The guy here playing Alasdair was a special kind of awful, initially sounding like someone they literally pulled off the street and told to read from cue cards on the spot. This performance later seems to degrade, as though he had just consumed a tremendous amount of alcohol and/or marijuana right as they first filmed him, and it gradually started to kick in as the scene progressed, turning into a meandering, mumbling performance that is at the very least fascinating to listen to.

25-30 minutes of watching guys get drunk does not make for quality entertainment. Also, everyone drops the occasional F bomb, but I swear (pun intended), if you took the F word out of this film, there would only be about 10 minutes of dialogue.

I don't mind overused plots. There is nothing new under the sun, but at least do it well. PA proved you don't have to have a huge budget to make a great film. Try using a thesaurus and come up with some real dialogue next time.

This had so much going for it, until the third act. The introduction of a character that required as strong a performance as the three primaries was almost its undoing - Alistair cannot act. That aside, it's a creepy film that will get under your skin and shows great promise for the film makers responsible.