zaterdag 19 juli 2014

The Sacred (2012)

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Genre : Horror
Country : US

Cast :
Heather Roop : Jessie
Brighid Fleming : Leah
Jeff Fahey : George

Director :
Bret Donowho

Summary
A young girl bravely travels up to her dead Aunts cabin for creative inspiration. Marie gets more than she bargained for, when she soon realizes she is not alone. Confronted by evil spirits, she is forced to fight for her life.

My opinion

Are you someone who has never seen a horror in his life and just decided to take the big step and it should remain fairly soft, then you definitely should watch "The Sacred". But if you want to start up allready with something more heavy in this genre, then you better forget about this movie. I don't want to feel guilty about the fact that new horror fans would drop out because they came to the conclusion that the horror genre isn't that special anyway after watching this film. Because relating "The Sacred" to the horror genre is as ridiculous as claiming that the little snow man in "Frozen" is a real living snowman they have recruited in Lapland. Sheer nonsense!

Indeed there is an evil spirit and you can see a ritual of an exorcism in the opening scene. But like one swallow does not make a summer, those elements won't make this film a horror. I'm sure the creators watched a lot of horror movies about cabins in the woods and possessed people, with their notebooks ready. Because virtually every conceivable cliché has been used. One follows after the other in such a pace that it looks like "Am laufenden Band" with Rudi Carell. But instead of a conveyor belt with prices, it's one with overused horror elements.

Jessie (Heather Roop) is a writer who suddenly faces the well-known phenomenon of a writer's block. Not to worry. Jessie has a cabin inherited from her aunt, who obviously deceased under mysterious circumstances, and uses this opportunity to stay over there and confront herself with her past and so regain some inspiration. So she moves to this secluded cabin in the woods. Soon strange things start to happen and blablablablabla .....

First there is the ridiculous oversupply of used horror elements: self-opening doors, a clock that's always showing the wrong time, a falling vase, sudden appearances, a radio getting smashed, shadows in the mirror, a doll that appears somewhere all the time, the staring villagers, scary sounds and creaking floors, banging on the door, friends appear and eventually become victims ... You can even hear a priest doing an exorcism. The technique of filming in a way as if it appears that someone is spying on you from behind a bush or from the upper floor, has also been used infinite times. And something that starts getting on my nerves over and over again, is the fact that everyone knows nothing or they don't want to talk about it, and then suddenly they come up with some story about something that happened in the past.And of course Jessie responds to these phenomena as if nothing is going on and it's just kind of weird. Naive girl!

About the performances we can brief : that was for me the greatest horror element. Totally unbelievable and amateurish. When Jessie started crying, I also almost started crying spontaneously myself. Not because it was so touching, but because it looked so miserably. Besides, it was also laughable how Jessie was portrayed. In the beginning, she looked like a frigid old aunt, and afterwards when she starts cleaning in that cabin, she looked like a sexy pop artist with an ultra-short cut-off jeans and a translucent t-shirt swinging around with her mop. My conclusion after seeing all these scenes (because she is shown regularly bra-less while wearing a see-through t-shirt) is that it was really cold in that forest. It looked like some Darts Tournament in London. "One Hundred and Eighty" times I've looked at those erect antennas

Anyway, it's also a bad omen when they throw in some lesbian sex scenes and some explicit images of Jessie taking a shower. Usually this is done to embellish things and to hide the fact that this is a terrible movie. The denouement is so incredibly far-fetched using terrible looking special effects. If this was a movie from the 70's, then I would understand. And you don't need to be clever to guess the open end. Is there anything good to say about this movie? Yes, the performance of Brighid Fleming as Leah, is admirable. But that couldn't save this disaster.