This movie starts out with an overly long scene of a woman driving a huge truck through a forest. It is unknown if she is fleeing, but she seems to be injured. There are two annoying babies crying the whole time, and as I lose my attention on the driving, I notice that this is one of those movies that desaturates the color, which makes me predict that I am going to endure a bad movie that will only be finished because I have to review it.
The woman arrives at a remote peasant house and dies.
The movie then jumps to a lady with resting-bitchface in some Russian office, for a reason that I forgot because I couldn’t stop wondering why such an ugly woman was chosen for the role. Was she there because she inherited something? I have no idea, but I had a quickly vanishing intention to finish the movie, and I assumed that at some point I would figure it out.
Resting-bitchface hired someone to drive her to a remote location in Russia. I don’t know what the hell the ride was about because I was again drawn to the desaturation. I mean, why not film in black and white if you hate color so much?
The woman has to exit the truck and walk, even though there is still a road. I know that I heard the words but I can’t recall them because this was just the start of extremely bad dialogue and I am currently trying to purge it from my brain, but during that early scene, part of me wondered if this was not truly stupid and part of a drugged sequence or something like that.
The woman enters a house that seems to have been abandoned a long time ago, a house in the middle of nowhere yet it has electricity.
The shots in which there is no electric light has a green tinge which made me wonder why a moviemaker wanted to totally copy the green tinge of a well known horror movie. Even if this is a coincidence, why do it? I often wonder if moviemakers worry about being flagged as corny a decade from now. “Remember when horror movies took out the color almost to the point of grayscale but in some scenes made on dominant stupid color, like green? Or blue. How many times will we see a snowfield that is blue? These are the thoughts going through my mind as I watched a movie that went nowhere.
I had to remind myself that I was assigned this movie for a review, not for my personal entertainment.
The woman runs out of the house for a reason I totally forgot because I was taken out of the movie almost the entire time, asking things like “Is anything going to happen or did the moviemaker think he was astounding the viewers with atmosphere?
Bam! The woman awakens inside the house, and a man is there who gives no indication that he is aggressive. He didn’t do anything to her when she was unconscious, and she is not restrained, so why does she bash him in the face with a stick?
They guy has a Russian accent but he speaks American slang, which is something I cannot stand in movies. Don’t Americanize foreigners. And why was he speaking English to her? The woman was born in Russia. That much I remember.
Anyway, the guy is the woman’s brother, her twin. I guess the two babies in the beginning of the movie are these two. I was about to wonder why they separated, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was to justify the time I had wasted. I wasn’t going to sleuth anything. By that point, I had realized that the writing was bad and it didn’t matter what the mystery was, that is, if there was one. Maybe the only mystery was how this movie got funded.
Did I tell you that the movie was bad? Well, the guy is an information-giver. I don’t know why the woman never asked “How do you know that?
“Those two people who look like us, except with white contact lenses… they are our doppelgangers.” Ok, I have to pause here. The guy acted as if he didn’t know what the things were, but he shot the one who looked like him, and he received the bullet wound. He then told his sister that whatever happens to the doppelgangers happens to them. Another bit of comedy is that the woman asks this imbecile who has a bullet wound to protect her, which would be stupid even if he wasn’t shot, because she knocked him out with a stick earlier.
When the pair decide on a part of the house to hang out, the guy pours liquor into his wound and then digs out the bullet with a knife. I don’t know if the moviemaker thought this would be a good gore scene, but it was stupid, so much so that it made me laugh.
After that, it was just one gimmick after another, like shaking the camera for no reason. It was imitation done very badly, and repetitively. Like, after the information-giver brother said that something was going to happen at midnight, there was banging, and objects flying. Nails withdrew from the boards that were blocking the door, and then reverse-motion was used to make broken glass become intact again. Wow! I am astounded. But this was all for absolutely no pay off. Nothing happened.
There was an entertaining movie based on a real life woman who wanted to be an opera singer but was tone deaf, but she had the wealth to make her dream come true. I wonder if this movie was made the same way. A person with absolutely no talent has the money to make his dream come true. If I had been told that before I started watching, I might have been entertained. Instead, I saw a movie that started out mediocre, but became increasingly stupid, to the point when I laughed, especially when I saw the ending.
I saw a cartoon in a Dungeons & Dragons magazine in which orcs were up to no good. One of them said to the others “We disguises ourselfs as paladins and…” and it reminds me of the people who made this movie. Low class people trying to pass themselves off as high class. That’s how it looks.
I wanted to delve into the behind-the-scenes that are on the disc, but the director spoke Spanish. I hated reading subtitles to a featurette of a movie I hated, and when one of the cast said that the director speaks perfect English, I ejected the disc and threw it into a wall.
If you want to feel like someone has played a joke on you, then by all means, watch this. It’s the most inauthentic movie I have seen in a long time.