I cannot say that I recommend watching four Blumhouse movies in one weekend, but I did it. Amazon released four different Blumhouse movies, that were all about 90 minutes each. None of them were scary, and they did not reach any level close to the pinnacle of other Blumhouse movies. The four that were released range from the low end of okay to terrible. It seems like for every good film they put out, they have to put out three or four terrible ones. Two of the premises for these movies were good ideas, but they were not executed to a high level, the other two did not have good premises or execution.
The first one I watched was The Lie, and of the four, it was the best, which is not saying much. It was about a teenage daughter who allegedly pushes her best friend off of a bridge in the middle of the winter somewhere with a good amount of snow, and her parents try to cover up the crime to prevent their daughter from being arrested for murder. (Spoilers ahead) Oddly after the murder, the friend’s body was not seen by the time the Dad reached the bridge, and the water did not seem deep enough or fast enough to carry it too far. Also the girl’s phone who fell had traveled an unrealistic distance to land perfectly in the snow not in the water, and the daughter in the days following did not seem to be remorseful or sad. This led me to believe there was something off with her, that she could kill her friend and seemingly feel nothing. The Dad of the girl that was killed slowly found out that the other family was in on his daughter’s disappearance, and it did not help that the family was incredibly bad at hiding evidence. They kept the disappeared girl’s phone so that it could be traced back to them, and once they realized that they kept it, they tried to bury it in the girl’s backyard, where they were caught by the disappeared girl’s dad. Then there were multiple times when the altercations between the two dads got physical, and finally every lie the family told trying to protect their daughter from being arrested told unraveled very quickly. They were not prepared to be criminals. In the end the family trying to protect their daughter ended up killing the disappeared girl’s dad to cover up the fact that they were caught trying to bury the disappeared girl’s phone. Then the movie ends with the girl who was supposedly pushed off the bridge walking into the parents’ garage as they were cleaning her dad’s blood off the grill of the car, and they realized they had been protecting their daughter from a murder that did not even occur, and that they committed a real murder for no reason. (If you have not seen the movie this might be hard to follow, but basically a family committed a murder to cover up a murder that they thought their daughter committed, but it did not actually happen.)
Much of the movie was not interesting until the last twenty minutes or so when the story really picks up, but what it really comes down to is a spoiled girl who just wanted her divorced parents to be back together. She said she was going to tell them that she did not really push her friend off the bridge, but she saw how close it brought them all together that she let the lie last longer. The idea of wanting your family to be together and be happy is one that I can get behind, but she was willing to pretend to be a murderer to get her family back together, and that is just too far, if it takes something like that to bring your family back together, it is probably too far gone anyways. The sad thing is that due to this lie her parents commit a real murder and the family will never get the chance to be together again, so instead of fixing it, she ended up just making it worst, but at least she will have those two days where her parents thought she was a murderer…
The second of the four that I watched was Nocturn. This was about a girl that went to a music boarding school with her sister, but she was never as good. There was a girl who went to the school as well, and she committed suicide. The sister that was not as good found the girl who committed suicide’s journal. The journal seems to have special powers and predictive powers. The girl who had been in her sister’s shadow slowly rises above her sister, and she takes everything her sister found dear. She took her sister’s spot as the soloist in the senior recital, she takes her boyfriend, and she takes her personal teacher. The only problem was that the journal was driving her slowly insane, and at the end of the movie instead of performing the solo for the recital, she also commits suicide. There was no part of this movie that was interesting, and it was not scary at all either. It was more of an unbelievably bad teen drama than a horror movie. There was not much to take away from it, except that it is not worth watching, and that I had wasted an hour and a half of my life.
The third film was not much better than the last. It was the story of an Indian girl in her late 20s, and her mom really wants her to get married, but none of the set up matches have gone well. The daughter comes across a rich young Indian man at a coffee shop, and he seems perfect. They get set to be married, but the Mom figured out that the man was her dead abusive boyfriend reincarnated. The whole story was uneventful, it was interspersed with flashbacks of the mom getting attacked by her old boyfriend. None of it was scary, and it mainly just showed an unhealthy relationship between a mother and her daughter. Just like the other two movies, the story was underwhelming, and it was not scary. It does give some cultural insight to arranged marriage and other aspects as well, but I am not watching a Blumhouse movie for cultural insight.
The last movie was the second best of the four. It had what I think was an original and creative story, but it did not quite reach its potential. A man makes a miraculous recovery from a car accident where his wife died, but parts of his memory were missing. So while raising his daughter, he decided to enroll in an experimental treatment. The treatment basically puts the guy into a trance so he can go into his memory and regain what was lost. While in his old memories, there was a man who had a blurred face that walked on all fours and had broken bones that kept trying to attack him. As it turns out the doctor who was giving the experimental treatment had lost her son, who was not that great of a guy, he was a in relationship where he was the abuser to his wife and maybe his child. The doctor had uploaded her son’s consciousness into the brain of the man who should have died in the car accident, and the man with the blurred face and trying to attack in the memories was the guy trying to take back over his body. In the end the abuser concedes, and the guy gets his body back. This felt like an episode of Black Mirror but turned into a short movie instead of a TV episode. Of the four it had the best scare factor to it, but it was still not that scary. They needed to heighten the tension more and make the plot feel more meaningful. The way they made it, it projected the twist, so they needed to keep it more hidden and raise the stakes more.
Overall these movies all seemed to have a common theme of messed up familial relationships, from parents covering up a murder for their daughter, a sister stealing her sister’s shine, a mom putting too much pressure on her daughter, and a mother who could not cope with the loss of her son, so she tried to bring him back. There are movies that can take a broken family dynamic and make it into a great film, but none of these developed the characters well enough for there to be any buy in to the story. These were good movies to have on the background, but none of them deserved my full attention, and I wish I had used my time more wisely and watched something else new that I knew had a better reputation going in, but my expectations were not high going into it. So if you want to watch any of these, I suggest The Lie or Black Box. All the movies were quick watches, so that was a plus. They did all receive failing grades, and it was deservedly so. Be better Blumhouse.
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