Da Punisher 611

i like it...but felt rather empty with the ending....


was there something i was missing or didnt understand?

Why So Blu?

Not really. It was what it was. It shifted from horror into straight up fantasy.

GatorDeb

I enjoyed it.

Jackskeleton

I'm far less offended that you and your wife feel that everything needs to confirm to your language and far more offended that you find the need to sign your post.

Like, we see your name to the left of the text written. You don't need to sign your post. Me and the forum don't like reading your signature. Could you get someone to dub it in so I don't have to read it? Perhaps Morgan Freeman?

As for this film. It's by the numbers, has the shock scares. But hey, it's a lot better than stuff like Paranormal activities.

DeputyDave

I agree, I can't wait for that genre to die a quiet death.

-DeputyDave

chaz k

I thought it was pretty good. It took a little too long to get going, but once it did there were some really creepy scenes. The last 10 minutes turned my recommendation from go see it to rent it. But it was worth the $5 admission.

JumpCutz

-JumpCutz

Venom

Not often, hmm maybe never in fact, has a horror movie made me shed a tear or two.
Also one or two decent jump scares that were effective, another rarity from a horror movie for me.

all around a pretty good movie.

pjflyer

I had the same feeling for this as I did "Sinister" last year. It was creepy and intriguing watching it but by the end I'm rolling my eyes. I guess it's still a halfway decent time at the movies but I can't see me ever watching either movie again.

hanshotfirst1138

An intriguing effort, but not quite an effective one. Arriving as an expansion of director Andres Muschietti's short film (Is he Italian or Spanish?), with a much-hyped endorsement from executive producer Guillermo del Toro (Who's artistic involvement was probably minimal.), the Spanish-Canadian co-production hits screen late, having originally been slated for the Halloween horror rush. As far as PG-13 frightfests go, Mama is pretty effective, but once the film turns its cards over, it's a disappointing mishmash of obvious plot beats. The unknown isn't scary once its known.

Mama begins, after a literal "Once upon a time," with a father trying to take his two children after brutally murdering his wife and business partners, his car careens off of a snow-covered cliff, and he takes the children into the woods. He takes shelter in a nearby cabin, planning to murder the children and kill himself, but a mysterious, shadowy figure stops and him, and gives the children a cherry to eat. One is too young to realize exactly what's going, young Lily (doe-eyed Isabelle Nélisse). The other, older Victoria (Megan Charpentie), is in need of eyeglasses, and is unable to see the true nature of their mysterious benefactor.

Five years later, their father's brother Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has been tirelessly spending all of his money to search for them, while living with his spunky wannabe rock star girlfriend Annabelle (Jessica Chastain). A search party finally finds the cabin, and the little girls within, who are now feral and animalistic after five years. Slowly rehabilitated by psychiatrist Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash) and reintegrated back into society, custody is given to their uncle and his decidedly unwilling partner rather than to their more financially stable and logical choice of their maternal aunt Jean (Jane Moffat). Dreyfuss initially posits that the girls so-called "Mama" is merely an imaginary friend conjured by the girls in their attempts to survive, or that whoriest of cliches, the split personality. But as he digs into the past surrounding the cabin, Dreyfuss discovers that the truth may be something significantly more sinister...

It's easy to see why Guillermo del Toro's name is being bandied about on the poster. How much artistic input he had into the picture is questionable, but it shares his interest in dark fairytales. At its best, Mama evokes the deep melancholia at the heart of all great ghost stories, attempting to harken back to the best genre films that the Universal logo promises. Its backstory is constructed as a very sad tale of damaged mother desperate to hold onto something wrongfully taken from her. The film tries to build a theme and write the story around that. Early on, and for the first half or so, Muschietti inserts jolts and shocks pretty regularly every 10-15 minutes, and while some are pretty wrote, many are still effective. A particular standout is the shot of young Lily playing tug-of-war with her blanket with the just out of the frame Mama. Much spookiness ensues, including symbolic womb-like openings, moths as harbingers of Mama, and creepy, echoing singing and distortion through guitar amps. Once Mama plays its hand, however, all of the pieces fall into play, and the story itself seems sadly predictable and renders many of the first-half shocks as hollow.

At its best, the sadness at the heart of great supernatural tales ties into universal themes, and there is a great sadness in Mama that gives sympathy for its monstrous central character. But too many plot points seem schizophrenic and illogical. Dreyfuss goes from a man of science to a believer in the supernatural in the blink of an eye, his attempts to discover Mama as he goes creeping around a dark house in the middle of nowhere seem like stupid horror movie victim behavior. Add that to a series of contrived deus-ex machina dream sequences and hypnotherapy sessions designed to reveal the backstory and Annabell's mysterious and near instantaneous transformation from reluctant caregiver to lovingly maternal. The subplot with Aunt Jean suspecting abuse attempts to tie the film into the idea of the thin fissure that separates fantasy and reality, but it ultimately goes nowhere, leaving her to turn up as a slasher victim, later turned into a monster in the busy third act. Anabelle also turns from relicant caregiver to lovingly maternal in a single scene. Cap that off with a finale which either makes no sense or is totally lost symbolically on my thick head, and there are plot holes you can drive a truck through.

I for one prefer del Toro's woefully underrated The Devil's Backbone, a subtle, atmospheric chiller with a wonderfully heartbreaking sadness and strong political overtone at its Gothic heart, to his more widely acclaimed and phantasmagorical Pan's Labyrinth. Both films are good, but I find Backbone better gets at the heart of the sympathy for its ghastly apparition and the sadness at the heart of its multilayered story. Like the del Toro produced and penned Don't Be Afraid of the Dark remake, the early moments are deliciously spooks and atmospheric, but once the films play their hand and start explaining their fairy tale origins, you're reminded of the cardinal rule of screenwriting: show, don't tell. It takes a very, very deft hand to balance scares, emotions, and multiple thematic balls in the air, and Muschietti doesn't quite have the skill to make everything cohere.

Mama is a wildly mixed bag, and it seems to have split many viewers. I'm right down the center. I appreciate its attempts at old school scares over gore and its attempts at giving an old story an emotional center. At its weakest, the film is a muddled scare show resorting to loud musical stings and a contrived storyline. At its best, though, it has real emotional heft, such as the scenes of Mama's monstrous hands caressing her surrogate children's faces, which strike a balance between creepy and tender. DDT's effects work, like in del Toro's films, attempts to give the titular monstrosity personality, but less is often more, and the more we see of Mama in the light instead of the spooky shadows, the less frightening she becomes. The performances are all pretty good, if hamstrung by the screenplay, particularly the kids, who's innocence and gravity help them to transcend the "creepy kids" cliches and give the film a proper sense of how difficult the choices are for them. The film is pitched between its good elements and the bad, and it's ultimately and ambitious but ineffective chiller. Still, ambition and emotional weight are things to be appreciated and admired, but its ultimately up to each individual viewer how much of the good and the bad that they take away. Me, I'm sort of in the middle.

The Infidel

I'm with you on most of that. I just finished watching it, and found the first part of the movie reminiscent of 2003's Darkness Falls' tooth fairy for the creature, and the Ring movies for the way they handled revealing the backstory. You could definitely get a feel for Del Toro's influence in the movie, in the eventual wrapping-up of the story, and the fairy tale way Mama and Lilly concluded. That end made sense to me once it happened, because Mama was the only "mama" Lilly had known, her being just a baby when everything went down five years earlier. Her attachment to Mama never waned through the whole movie, so it made sense they would wind up together.

But yeah, there were several things that didn't make sense. Why would the doctor decide to go out to the cabin the middle of the night, when at that point in the movie nothing really major had happened yet. I also thought at first Annabel was a little too dismissive of the girls to all of a sudden be so bonded to them. They established her pretty well at the beginning definitely not wanting kids, but who's to say she couldn't have a change of heart fairly quickly once she got to spend time with them. Maybe the maternal thing is something that is able to kick in at a moment's notice. Since I'm not a woman, I didn't really question that too much in this movie, and let it go.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty good movie, but it took the movie ending for me to finally decide that. I liked the horror elements and the story they were slowly revealing, but once it got into that fairy tale feel, I couldn't really figure out where it was going, and I felt they were going through certain motions too quickly, and trying to still keep those horror elements going while telling the fairy tale. I think they were trying to balance it all, but the movie felt pretty black and white. An "act one/act two" kind of thing, with each act directed by two different people, like From Dusk Til Dawn. Still, not bad, and I'll probably watch it again sometime.

bluetoast

I find it interesting that Scary Movie V was pretty much based on this beat for beat, but they were only a few months apart. That was a fucking fast turnaround, but Scary Movie V did suck ass.

Solid Snake

Blind Bought this super cheap. I really loved it. Had no problems with the plot. A bit too fantastical with the reality of some moments. That storage room is massive. Great shot though. Bits like that stretched it out too far but didn't hurt it. Bits like that old lady. She cheesed it up a bit.

Really liked Chastain's character. Her look especially.

Really love the overall fantasy tone it invokes in emotion and action.

A good buy and film for me.

Why So Blu?

Yessir!

Solid Snake

She was fucking hot with the tats and hair. Loved her character's attitude too.