KawaiiKiwi

At 54 minutes running time, I'm not sure if this is a movie or a pilot episode for an abandoned series. The ''movie'' ends in the middle of a sentence, with absolutely no ending, straight to the credits. The story is about a teen who moves into a new house for the summer, where she meets two other kids in a rather unconventional way. One morning she wakes up and some girl is standing in her bedroom. Strangely, she never bothers to ask who let her inside her house, and why she is there. They decide to go for a hike in the backyard forest and meet a guy hiding in the trees. Never bothers to ask where he's hiding in her yard either. The way the trio meets is so unnatural and weird that I just couldn't take it seriously. Especially since the actors are not particularly good and the lines are delivered in a way that I can't see any kids being able to relate to them.

Then they decide to visit a historical house in the village (as if kids really do that) and become obsessed with it for no reason and end up spending the following days researching the house's history at the library (again, as if kids really do that). The movie's driving plot is so hard to believe that it's difficult to put up with the rest. Then the rest of the story has to do with a ghost and the kids investigating and trying to free it. It's like a really long episode of Goosebumps, but with a terrible script, awful special effects, and nothing interesting. There is however one scene that gave me the creeps and I was surprised that it was in the movie as it was genuinely creepy and didn't fit the rest of the movie's colorful fantasy tone.

Other that that it's definitely not scary in any way and is actually a super colorful movie with vibrant visuals and some nice shots. However at times I felt like they added way too much saturation and as a result some outside scenes had a fake CGI look that looked really weird. Overall, this could be okay for kids if only it had an ending, but it doesn't, and I don't see a sequel anywhere, so it's just like an intro to a series that doesn't exist. I can't see the point of wasting time on this, unless they can release the rest of the story (which most likely will never happen since the kid actors are too old now).

I love fantasy-horror, so I was immediately drawn to this movie when I saw the trailer, but unfortunately, the trailer was much better than the movie itself. The characters are one-dimensional and the bad guy is just flat with absolutely no motivation. Mermaid Down plays out like a dark fairytale, but it's not scary enough to be a horror film, so it just ends up as some sort of Twilight mermaid story (with girl power friendship instead of love). I liked the premise of the movie at first and there are some good scenery shots here and there, but overall it was just very cheesy and not developed enough. The acting was extremely average and it clearly lacked budget, although that's not really the problem here. It just isn't very good in any aspect. It might have been sort of decent if it was darker, or without the invisible girl character, but that part of the story just made it feel like the movie was meant for young teenagers. I'm not too sure who this movie is meant for; overall just very disappointing.