Sunday, October 10, 2010

Reeds, The - 1.5/5

Being lost is scary. Being lost on water is even scarier. Being lost on water with something horrific in the reeds around you is fucking scary. "The Reeds" is not. Despite an interesting concept and proposal for a nightmarish journey, this little British film falls ass over teapot into its own muddy banks and accomplishes very little in the ways of utilizing its own scares. Too bad, cause it could have rocked it too.

Six friends hobbled out of their city lives to take a trip on a boat through some sort of marshland to get a bit of relaxing done. Unfortunately, there happens to be something in the reeds that wants them to never leave. So it uses all kinds of ghostly tricks to turn their lovely vacation into a trip of terror.

"The Reeds" might have a pretty stellar concept to give its audience a decadent scare ride into ole Horror-ville, but it fails. Straight up fails at a lot of things. Half the time the film feels unsure of what it wants to be (A monster movie? A ghost movie? A time lapse film? Who the fuck knows.) and the other half of the time its story line progression is so blurred with its own attempts at being artsy and scary that it fails to recognize it needs to make any sense. It just meanders from one moment to the next with needless drift as we try desperately to put two and two together.

If it wasn't for this senseless lack of cohesion and continuity of plot, than this film might have worked. The cast does decent enough to get by and the look of the film has a nice raw 80s feel to it (despite its obvious modern style). Other than that though, its hard to find a whole lot going good for this overly stylized Horror flick.

"The Reeds" just ends up a muddled cliche gamble of moments squashed together. Not too clever, but not dumb enough to a fun romp either. With the potential of its source material it makes it feel even more of a disappointment.

BONUS RANT: Um, who the hell thinks a boat ride into fucking marshland for a couple of days is an actual vacation? I'm not even all that into leaving the house, but even that seems like a pretty weak idea of fun to me. They had this coming to them for taking such a shitty getaway. That's my opinion.


Written By Matt Reifschneider

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