Reviews

I really liked the premise of this movie. The idea of all these different people disappearing from the same spot because something took them has so much potential. I got that setup from the trailer, but unfortunately, the movie takes forever to reach that point, which puts you so far ahead of the film. That might be OK if you cared about the characters and liked them, if the story pulled you in before that, but it didn't, and I found the two sisters to be very tedious.

I didn't think either girl was sympathetic or interesting. You'd imagine Tricia would be since she lost her husband and has no idea where he went. She is the better actress of the two, but I still didn't feel for her. Maybe it's because I didn't get any real sense of the relationship she had with her husband. Although her acting was natural, she didn't feel like a real person. It probably didn't help that she was pregnant when her husband had been missing for so long and yet there was no guy around so then it seems like she just slept with some random stranger. Of course, you find out differently very soon. But the nightmares/hallucinations of her dead husband always standing around got old real quick, and none of those were scary. The monster/killer/ghost standing in the background behind a victim has been overdone to death. There is an outstanding incredible payoff for this, but it takes a long time to get to it. The beginning of the film just feels like it goes on and on forever. They show Callie out running several times. They could've cut that a lot shorter. But one of the main problems is you don't have a reason to care, because nothing is at stake. Not until you get past act one.

As for Callie, the other sister, there wasn't anything to latch onto there either. It didn't help that the actress playing her just seemed like she was acting the entire time. She never seemed believable. Her character is one I've seen countless times... the "recovered" drug addict. All that did was make for an annoying reason why no one believed her later on and why the movie can't move past its initial premise or really develop it further.

Big spoiler alert.

Daniel, the missing husband, is the most interesting of all the characters. When he's on screen, you're fascinated. The movie needed to get to him a lot faster or go more into Walter Lambert (Doug Jones, the amazing Abe Sapien), the other missing character, but really Daniel should've been the main character. The wife, the way she's written and acted, is just not very interesting especially next to Daniel and what happened to him. They say conflict is the heart of a story. Tricia just doesn't have that much conflict. She still puts up fliers for her dead husband and she's not quite ready to move on (even though she got pregnant, which is contradictory), but that's not nearly enough conflict to hang the first act of a movie on, and the hallucination of her dead husband doesn't cut it. As a guy who watches tons and tons of horror films, I've seen that stuff before, and the way they executed it here was not frightening. It could've been, but they didn't pull it off. Skew, another indie low budget horror film I watched recently, does a much, much better job of scaring you. It also has a slow build (so slow I almost turned it off), but when that first scare hits, it gets you. The beginning of Absentia is not scary at all unless you've never seen a horror film before. The idea of something taking people and all these people missing from the same spot is a scary idea, but the movie doesn't do much with it.

I guess maybe the filmmaker thought the mystery of the missing husband would be enough to draw the audience in. But I saw the trailer, and I know something took him. I want to know more about that. Even the basic premise on the back of the DVD tells you that something unnatural happened so let's get to that already. As soon as the film gets really interesting with Daniel, he's gone again, and you get the standard horror cliché of no one believing the one witness. It's just annoying, because the audience knows the truth so you just want the other characters to catch up and stop being idiots.

I was really surprised the movie refrains from gore throughout almost the whole duration, and then right near the end, it tosses out a dead fetus. I think that's just bad taste and shocking to be shocking, which doesn't shock me since far too many horror films lately have involved bloody fetuses. It's just silly. And the ending is shown on the ridiculously-photoshopped, cheap-looking DVD cover, which I'm sure turns away a ton of people. I bought the movie based on the trailer, the awards, and all the rave reviews. The DVD cover would've made sure I didn't buy it, because it looks awful like a silly SyFy movie or something. But either way, I was really disappointed with the film. You don't get any answers to your questions really. They have some neat ideas like that of trading and the creature being underneath everything, feeding people animals, etc. but there is a lot of really, really boring stuff to wade through. I've seen tons of deliberately-paced movies so I don't expect explosions every 10 seconds or anything like that, but you need to have stakes, characters you care about, etc. It shouldn't take so long to get to Daniel or the real story of the movie.

It took three hours by car to see this at the True False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri, but I couldn't have been happier I went. As far as anthology films go, this is the best I've seen (sorry Tales from the Darkside), and as far as a horror film, it has everything you want and more... boobs, blood (practical too), and monsters. One of the best parts is how they were able to tell five completely different stories, all of them with good acting, excellent FX, like-able characters, etc.

My favorite was the webcam piece since it had a really funny moment involving a knife in a girl's arm. Plus, there were a lot of well-done scares in it. You don't even want to look at the screen since you're afraid of what's coming next. Then the reveal at the end turned it upside down and left me thinking about it long after but in a good way. I really liked the performance of the lead girl in that one. She was endearing, and it was actually kind of sad what happens. I think I liked her character the most of anyone in the film.

All the segments are good though. The first one took a little bit of time to get going, but once it kicks in, you're hooked, and the payoff is that much better since you had to wait for it. It also had some dark humor, wicked gore, nudity, etc. It's true blood and boobs don't make a good film, but in the case of a horror film, they sure can help, not that this movie needed it since the storytelling and the writing was fantastic too. They didn't have to worry about too much exposition as well since it's an anthology, and they don't have to explain everything, but that's part of the fun. You get to see some really crazy stuff like a pretty insane, inventive slasher, but you also get ghosts, a demon, etc.

The only downside is rather inherent in anthology stories, which is you basically start from scratch with each section so you have to build character and story again, but there isn't much of a way around that. Maybe Trick r' Treat handled that better, but I still prefer VHS. It's a little more evident when you have five stories without much connective tissue, but again, you get more variety this way, and the film was well paced so it wasn't a big deal.

I'm kinda sick of the whole found footage thing, but I didn't mind it with this movie. They didn't call attention to it a lot or try to explain why they're filming (Diary of the Dead shame on you) so it works, and you just get engrossed in the stories. The audience gasped a lot, but they laughed too (intentional humor only). Besides seeing Freddy vs Jason with a crowd, this was one of the best times I've had watching a movie in a theater.