Recovery

Im just writing this as a warning to other viewers out there do not waste your time on this incredible piece of space waste. From the start the story line fails to be convincing and it just gets thinner as the movie stumbles forward. Sigh, the lousy generic inexpressive electronic dance music complete works as a great soundtrack to this preposterously boring movie. I'm glad i did not watch it sober anyway...when my girlfriend who had fallen asleep during this torture asked me how it ended when i woke up, my kind of good mood flew out the window, because i actually had forgotten about the whole 82 minutes and it just came back to me, the incredibly dumb and unrealistic ways the actors reacts to stuff happening in the movie, the lousy music, the boring setting, the missing logic everywhere. The actors should as soon as possible (if they have not already) quit their jobs and go beg to flip burgers or whatever. This was a catastrophe. face palm. Sigh. Please dear production company, don't make more movies, get a new start in your lives, start a cleaning company or something useful. Cause you actually don't know how to entertain, Have you ever watched movies at all? do you guys know what plots, storytelling, acting and logic means? Im so furious that people like you actually has enough time and money to fart out this nonsense, that is so damn hard to cope with...and the facts that you don't have an all awful review just breaks my heart and i have lost my faith in humanity decades ago but this is the dot over the i.

Not the greatest directing so that made the acting not so great and the dialogue was awful, the ending summed up my feelings after watching the movie which was really, that's just stupid. This is the type of movie you watch with a group of like minded people and basically you talk the the entire movie about how bad it is, it's not even B movie bad or a cult movie bad, it's just bad. And the actors looked to close in age to be the parents of the so called high school students they almost looked the same age. I still don't get the "we can't get out of the house" smh or the make sure the person that is trying to kill you is either dead or they can't walk etc,and take a weapon and oh yeah the keys so you can unlock the doors and get out of the extremely raggedy house you are in

NOTE: I was given a screener copy of this film for the Dark Discussions Podcast.

Reverse home invasion films seem to be a thing this year. Films like Intruders and Don't Breathe tell tales of people breaking into the homes only to find something horrible waiting for them. I am sure there is something significant in that.

Unlike those other films, in which our protagonists are criminals trapped by bigger threats, Jess (Kirby Bliss Blanton), Logan (James Landry Hebert) and Miles (Alex Shaffer) are relative innocents drawn into a spider's web spun by the suburban equivalent of TCM's sawyer family.

How effective you find the film will likely depend on how much empathy you have for the teenage characters (Jess is about to graduate High School), who mostly act like teenage characters; in search of a good time, they lie to their parents, experiment with drugs, cheat on each other, and spend too much time on their phones. It is telling that the characters spend much of the film looking for Jess's phone, with little concern over the fate of their new friend Kim, who vanished along with it. Still, in a genre that is still grappling with how to deal with new technology in old tropes, using the phone as bait to draw in victims is inspired.

The film is a slow burn - though only 82 minutes long, more than half of that is spent leading up to the confrontation between Jess's friends and their would-be abductors. Once they arrive at the death trap that is the antagonist's home, there is still much Scooby Doo style investigation that takes place before Daddy gets home. Much of the action in the house is confusing, and I never got a handle on it's layout, but I suspect that was the director's intent.

Once the action does take place, I found the violence to be more authentic than stylish, with a few moments of good practical gore, and I rather liked the Phantom of the Opera tension between Jess and Edward.

The opening scene portends deeply disturbing notions by way of nasty, misogynist themes and violence. Thereafter the pacing is terribly slow - if we apply the model of conventional narrative structure, the "rising action" is mostly a flat plateau barely distinguishable from the "exposition," and more than half the runtime has eclipsed before it truly feels like the promised "horror-thriller" content is again showing up. This is rather troubling, but in addition: Is it just me? Did I have an abnormally unremarkable experience growing up in western Pennsylvania? Or are early scenes wholly unbelievable as the chief characters - high school students - drink alcohol and do drugs at massive parties, go out to clubs, apparently put all their personal information on social media, hang out with total strangers that they've only just met (online no less), and more?

In fairness, once the narrative does very belatedly pick up, 'Recovery' is duly engaging and executed pretty well. The cast is solid, the production design and art direction are splendid, and even lighting is employed notably well. I very much enjoy Giona Ostinelli's robust original music that lends strongly to the mood of any given scene. Director Darrell Wheat illustrates fine capability, especially in the latter half, and there are swell if grisly ideas in his story and the screenplay written with Kyle Arrington. The blood and gore look great, and the brutal violence, and I appreciate the hair and makeup work generally. Truthfully, at its best this is really well done, and I appreciate the obvious hard work that everyone put into it.

Would that the feature were a bit more mindful and balanced from the get-go. Half the runtime, about 40 minutes total, could probably be chopped up into only half its length without losing any substance. The excellence in the second half actually makes up a bit of ground for the weak start - a surprising "recovery," if you will. But the fact that there's anything to compensate for in the first place is an issue. When all is said and done this isn't half bad, and deserves a soft recommendation on account of its strengths. Bear in mind very necessary content warnings for not just significant violence, and specifically violence against women and associated themes that are all too real. Provided you don't mind when your horror-thriller entertainment is distinctly less than perfect, you could do a lot worse than 2016's 'Recovery.'

But well done as far as production. I guess you just gotta run with it. Pretty good acting. Pretty unbelievable storyline. It's worth watching for a laugh.