ekwetherington

I find myself perplexed at the love this movie gets. I enjoy a good slow burn movie, but this isn't slow burn, it's egregious padded. The plot isn't very complex, yet we spend 45 minutes going over the same points and dragging out every new development by having all the characters weigh in, even though they have nothing interested to add.

By the time the movie actually got to the real found footage part, I was just ready for it to be over. Other documentary style found footage movies manage to intersperse the actual footage much more effectively. Savageland did a much better job telling a story with just pictures than Horror in the High Desert. I'm not disappointed, I'm annoyed that recommendations from Reddit let me down yet again.

I'm genuinely baffled by the love this movie gets. The acting is bad, the writing is atrocious, and the plot is barely existent. The set up was interesting but once the "horror" starts, it gets boring really fast. There's very little tension or scares here, just people running around and dying.

The titular Pumpkinhead looks too much like a Xenomorph and left me yearning for the tension of Alien. While the puppeteering and effects for it are good, they commit the cardinal sin of showing PH way too often and too clearly for him to remain scary for more than 5 minutes.

Lance Henriksen's performance and the anit-revenge narrative keep this from being entirely unwatchable but I do no understand how this stood out from the glut of similar movies from the 80's.

This movie probably plays a lot better to casual fans of horror, but, for more seasoned viewers, nothing here is original or done as well as the movie they're borrowing from. While Sosie Bacon's performance anchors the whole film, the poor writing sees it all go to waste and not have the same impact as, for example, Essie Davis' performance in The Babadook. The poor writing stands out the most as any subtly and nuance is obliterated by characters directly stating the movie's themes, which were fairly obvious from the opening scene.

The film does have some solid jump scares and, at times, threatens to be tense and engaging, but huge sections feel like filler. It Follows does a much better job in creating a feeling that the monster is always after you and you can never relax, whereas Smile's creature shows up every now and again to remind us that this is a horror movie.

And then there's the demon voice. Any chance that I may have found this movie scary evaporated when the creature spoke using the corniest, most generic vocal effects. My wife and I both burst out laughing the instant we heard the voice and that was that for taking the movie any sort of seriously.

Smile is not necessarily a bad movie, but it fails to improve upon any of the ideas they borrow from other films and left me wishing I was watching one of them instead.