SPOILER ALERT
This movie starts out with a great premise. You have a town where everyone except one guy disappeared in 1940. Well decades later a group of historians or whatever they are get information on it and retrace the steps of the townsfolk for the purposes of getting material to write a book. We aren't even told really who these people are. What are their skills or credentials?
You are going to be given scenes of pseudo psycho babble "evaluations" one character does on the others which are never actually explained. Why does he do this? Dunno and by the end of the movie you won't care.
This is a movie about the descent into madness caused by some external force that from what I can tell is never, ever explained. I mean this is so disappointing and frankly, this is lazy film making and shoddy story telling.
Yes some of these artsy oriented film makers think this is solid work. It's not. This is lazy story telling. Why? Because in good story telling you have to come up with something that explains the central mystery. You have to take the reader or viewer from A to B and have it make sense. There are lots of ways to do this. Yellowbrickroad does none of this.
Instead we have characters descend into madness. For example the first initial kill scene is stupid. One male character attacks a female character after she takes the vintage hat he found and was wearing. I sat there wondering why that scene didn't end up on the cutting room floor. After that the characters have the full on breakdown of the group and it makes no sense whatsoever.
Yes, there's this mysterious music they are hearing and for effect the director cranks the volume from time to time to apparently shock you. Trust me. This fails miserably. In fact, all I did was turn down the volume when the music was cranked up.
Now don't get me wrong. Sometimes I'm OK with a good open ended ending. Sometimes mystery is satisfying. In Yellowbrickroad that's not the case. The ending looks tacked on. Here's the spoiler so quit reading. The main character is struggling at the end crawling on the ground and then voila he's back in the town in the movie theater. He sits down to watch the movie of their adventure or whatever it was. We get a flash of the dead all around him and then some pictures on the screen and he, oh my god, yes he screams.
Here are somethings any film maker reviewing this needs to keep in mind so as to not repeat the mistakes of this movie.
1. crisp clean clear images and film quality 2. proper microphone use 3. don't wash out the color when editing 4. don't use annoying sound effects to try to tell a story 5. explain your mystery with a logical or some kind of understandable conclusion
I gave this movie a rating of 1 for awful because it is. This is a bad movie.
This movie starts out with a great premise. You have a town where everyone except one guy disappeared in 1940. Well decades later a group of historians or whatever they are get information on it and retrace the steps of the townsfolk for the purposes of getting material to write a book. We aren't even told really who these people are. What are their skills or credentials?
You are going to be given scenes of pseudo psycho babble "evaluations" one character does on the others which are never actually explained. Why does he do this? Dunno and by the end of the movie you won't care.
This is a movie about the descent into madness caused by some external force that from what I can tell is never, ever explained. I mean this is so disappointing and frankly, this is lazy film making and shoddy story telling.
Yes some of these artsy oriented film makers think this is solid work. It's not. This is lazy story telling. Why? Because in good story telling you have to come up with something that explains the central mystery. You have to take the reader or viewer from A to B and have it make sense. There are lots of ways to do this. Yellowbrickroad does none of this.
Instead we have characters descend into madness. For example the first initial kill scene is stupid. One male character attacks a female character after she takes the vintage hat he found and was wearing. I sat there wondering why that scene didn't end up on the cutting room floor. After that the characters have the full on breakdown of the group and it makes no sense whatsoever.
Yes, there's this mysterious music they are hearing and for effect the director cranks the volume from time to time to apparently shock you. Trust me. This fails miserably. In fact, all I did was turn down the volume when the music was cranked up.
Now don't get me wrong. Sometimes I'm OK with a good open ended ending. Sometimes mystery is satisfying. In Yellowbrickroad that's not the case. The ending looks tacked on. Here's the spoiler so quit reading. The main character is struggling at the end crawling on the ground and then voila he's back in the town in the movie theater. He sits down to watch the movie of their adventure or whatever it was. We get a flash of the dead all around him and then some pictures on the screen and he, oh my god, yes he screams.
Here are somethings any film maker reviewing this needs to keep in mind so as to not repeat the mistakes of this movie.
1. crisp clean clear images and film quality 2. proper microphone use 3. don't wash out the color when editing 4. don't use annoying sound effects to try to tell a story 5. explain your mystery with a logical or some kind of understandable conclusion
I gave this movie a rating of 1 for awful because it is. This is a bad movie.