(This review may contain spoilers).
I watched the original movie this one was based on and I enjoyed that one a lot more than this, to be honest. I was very hesitant about watching this movie, but I thought I’d give it a chance and see if it might be better than I thought.
The thought of whether there’s life after death is one that is questioned a lot, so the idea of the flatlining itself was quite an intriguing one. But the original film handled it a lot better.
This movie was very much more about being a supernatural horror than making people think. There were too many cheap jump scares in this movie, with an atmosphere more than a little familiar.
Out of the characters, I found Courtney and Ray to have the most depth to them. Jamie just seemed to be a typical rich playboy, complete with living on a boat. Sophia came across as quite weak and passive…and Marlo was, to me, a very unsympathetic character, especially when her ‘secret’ was inevitably revealed.
On the other hand, I found it easy to relate to and empathise with Courtney. She had a lot of depth to her and even though I thought she handled things really badly when the movie took a darker turn, I found her a really intriguing character. And Ray, I thought, had more sense than many characters in horror movies seem to.
It was disappointing that, even though Kiefer Sutherland had a cameo in this movie, there were no links in to the original. There was nothing subtle about what the characters were experiencing and the flatline scenes actually gave away a lot of what the main characters had done wrong.
This movie would have been better as a sequel to the first rather than a remake. It was okay to watch once, but there was little that was unique or really added to the original. It was what I was expecting, but still disappointing. This isn’t a movie I intend to watch again.
Ink of Blood 