So. I feel like horror movies tend to follow a pretty simple formula:
Group of characters: Does something stupid and dangerous, like play with a ouija board or enter a haunted house.
Bad things occur, up to and including multiple people being killed.
Characters: Surprised Pikachu face.
I’d love to say this has no bearing in reality, but…replace ‘enter a haunted house’ with ‘have a party in the middle of a global pandemic’ and…yeah. I’m starting to think horror movies are just commentaries on people’s stupidity. Not all of them, of course…but I can’t honestly say that horror movie characters are stupider than real life people.
I wasn’t actually expecting to watch this movie today. There was a secret showing at Cineworld and I booked in for it. The movie had a rating of 15, but no genre indicated…and a rating of 15 could be so many different genres. After the trailers finished and the warnings of horror and bloody violence appeared, I did notice quite a few people walk out of the cinema, so I do think the genre (or at least an idea of the content) should have been included on the website.
Despite how formulaic this movie was, I did think that a severed hand rather than a ouija board or haunted house was a more unique way of having a group of teenagers open a doorway to the dead. And it was actually pretty interesting to see the way they all almost got high off of the experience (like doing drugs or drinking alcohol)…right up until things went so horribly and awfully wrong.
The problem with this movie was that the characters were so very bland. I actually had no real reason to care about what happened to them. Mia had apparently lost her mother, but I was confused over whether this had only just occurred, or if it had happened a while ago, because…she only seemed really affected by the loss when the plot called for it. And it apparently didn’t even occur to her to try and talk to her mother after the first time she held the hand?
The creepiest part of the movie was actually one of the bits that was shown in the trailer, where a possessed Mia is repeating, “Run!” over and over again. In this movie, she’s only talking to one of the other characters, which is actually a nice bit of foreshadowing…but aside from that, there was nothing really that creepy or standout about this movie. There were a couple of times I cringed and had to look away, but that was more to do with how disturbing the violence involving a minor character was…and that level probably should have pushed the movie towards an 18.
Apart from Mia, Jade and her mother and brother were the most developed characters, although I absolutely hated the mother. The way she spoke to Jade and accused her so much just made her come across as an abusive person. Okay, she was right about the party – but the way she interrogated Jade, Mia and Daniel over and over again left me feeling extremely uncomfortable about her. And even when she was understandably upset about what had happened, I couldn’t feel sorry for her because I was waiting for her to show more abuse, given how bad she’d been when there wasn’t an emergency.
On the whole, while there were a couple of unique aspects to this movie, it was pretty predictable with very little character development. From the trailer I saw, I was expecting a different kind of movie.
It’s probably worth seeing if you like horror movies and don’t mind particularly graphic scenes of violence, but I don’t think I’d watch this movie a second time.
Ink of Blood 