wesleyvanauken

I had heard a lot about this movie and I may have gone in with some slightly off expectations because of how gorgeous the animation was supposed to be. Right away it's trying to sell me toys in the first five minutes. The designs and scenes are geared very much for selling plastic to children.

The story they wrapped this commercial in was insultingly bad. If they had spent half as much on writers as they did on their voice acting talent they would have had something worth putting that gorgeous animation over.

Did I mention the gorgeous animation? It was pretty to look at but the dialogue and story were incredibly predictable and disappointing. I don't see myself ever bothering to watch this movie again and I wish I hadn't bothered the first time. An incredible waste of animator talent.

The rest of the movie was basically copy pasted from a thousand other low budget horror movies. The characters are cliches pulled from better films. It's sad that the entirety of creativity in this project filled twenty minutes and then the rest was badly stolen bits and pieces of better films. The acting is ok, they did what they could with exceptionally derivative material. The whole thing feels very much like it was made by a committee or some AI they fed a bunch of other similar movies and it sort out this pointless copycat of a film.

I'm considering using a video editor to chop that first 20 minutes free of the rest of the film and keeping that small bit in my collection as The Empty Man.

I didn't watch this one for a while after adding it to my collection. It was just another small budget horror thrown in the watch later bin. So glad I finally got around to watching this film. The camera work is good. Shots are beautifully set up. The characters are well developed. It reminded a bit of how Stephen King would always give you enough about the victims to care when he had the monster get them. A lot of horror tends to make the victims "deserve it" and that's what I thought I was getting here but instead I got was characters that while horrible, were also incredibly sympathetic. The writer made me care and that matters in good horror. The ending was very well done and over all I really enjoyed this movie. Some other reviews mention it being boring or slow, I found it was a very nice level of suspense but attention spans run short these days.

Definitely a keeper.