Reviews

For those saying this at least has an original idea, it doesn't. It's a very poor imitation of The Devil Rides Out.

Most of the acting is decent enough, especially the addict. I don't even mind the fixed location. A well-written version of this could make a great play. Unfortunately the tension within the group is only loosely touched upon.

The tension is non-existent. Trying to get something out of reach? Clothing is the obvious (and not 'genius') option. One full candle short? Cut one or two existing candles in half and light the wick.

The demon is meh, but made worse by just repeating the same footage whenever it appears.

As for the ending? The mark was removed from her arm after her brother read the ritual. Why not display some of these magical powers this demon apparently promised? It would have been something at least.

The first thing to mention is that this isn't really a found footage film. Yes they're making a documentary, and yes a lot of the footage is filmed by them, but large swathes of the film are recorded by unexplained external sources (cctv in a toilet cubicle?). It's really just a stylistic choice, ironically often excessively rendered by shaky footage in ways that most legitimate FF films avoid.

There are Monsters (terrible title) starts weirdly. It uses footage from the middle of the film, which is then repeated in full later. It feels clunky, and prevents the story from becoming creepy in a more organic manner. Many of the early scenes would have been far more disturbing without the instant reveal. It ruins any chance of building tension.

Having said that, this film is full of unnerving moments. There's plenty of paranoia, which is to be expected in a 'Body Snatchers' story, along with more traditional horror. The acting is mostly good, the pacing works well, and the writing is surprisingly tight. I'm not as positive about the directing, but the grocery store scene was a standout moment.

It's an entertaining low budget horror that does a very good job of delivering scares.

Hyde Pierce is extremely entertaining throughout, but this isn't an intricate cat and mouse chess game. It's incredibly sloppy writing. The leap from having the criminal randomly pick the home of an insane killer, to the insane killer happening to be the lieutenant investigating his crime is simply too far to ignore.

Good writing would have been to set this up in some way. The easiest being to have Hyde Pierce's character initiate an offer of assistance seemingly at random, only for it to be later revealed that he was tracking him from the very beginning. Something like that would have played into the 'always two moves ahead' sensibilities of the film.

As other have mentioned, the chess game, release, and stabbing was poor writing too. He could have just turned around and strangled him. It's not clever, it's just painfully contrived.

All the bad guys and girls essentially get away with it. I don't usually have a problem with those endings, but here it seemed cheap and dirty.

Still, the stuff it got right it got very right, and all of the performances were good. Just a shame about the leaps in logic.

First, the good things about this film. Visually it really is very impressive. It looks like a Star Wars film.

So that's the good stuff out of the way. The biggest problem with this film is that it treats its audience like idiots. Implausible scene follows implausible scene in ways that even 'the force' can't explain away. Admittedly this isn't a new issue. A New Hope has plenty of 'convenient' events. Even if you ignore all of the additional problems introduced by the prequels, ANH still has the droids happen to be bought and taken to Luke, who happens to know Old Ben Kenobi, who happens to live nearby. But this is palatable stuff in comparison to this film.

As a character I love Palpatine, so I will readily admit that I enjoyed seeing him again. However, there's no good reason for him being there that doesn't undermine the original and prequel trilogies in their entirety (unless Anakin's destiny was to have a daughter who gives birth to a dad-killing brat who shows up one day to lend Palpatine's inexplicably existing granddaughter some moral support and an extra lightsaber).

It's never clearly explained what he is. A clone? A corpse from RotJ? The original Sith Lord that just happens to look like Palpatine? When did he have a kid? Who was the mother? Did he raise his son? The most powerful man in the universe just happens to raise a nice guy who has the freedom to meet a nice girl, have their own daughter, and hide her away? When did that happen? Was this the first time any Sith Lord had offspring?

Why do Wayfinders even exist? Who made them and when? Why would Palpatine have one on the 2nd Death Star? Why would an ancient knife exist that highlights its location on said Death Star's crashed remains?

The logic of this film collapses like a house of cards in the slightest breeze. There's no story being told; it's just a series of random fetch quests and repeated beats of RotJ. Visually it's great, and an entertaining rollercoaster, but the story is held together with safety pins. Ren slaughters a load of people (including his dad), but has a change of heart when his mum dies. Rey says 'sure, why not' when given the choice to be possessed by her evil grandfather. Other people do other things that make no difference. Lando laughs a bit.

Even from a cynical cash grab perspective it doesn't make sense. Palpatine would have been desperate to find his granddaughter; seems like a good setup for a bunch of new and marketable bounty hunters to me. Instead just send Ren on a series of unsuccessful missions to kill her for no reason.

The general concept is good (though apparently stolen), and it does start off quite creepy with a nice slow build. Sadly it suffered from extremely poor writing that seemed to think that ignoring all basic logic would just go unnoticed.

The only time the writer addressed the plot with any hint of realism was at the beginning. OK, he's locked a guy in the cellar. Let's see if he has, then argue about what to do next.

After that it just gets thrown up in the air. Husband and wife would just leave and phone the police. At the very least they'd ask why he thinks it's the devil, followed by how he caught him, seeing as he's, well...the devil. When wife hears the devil laughing and using her name, why doesn't she mention any of this to husband? That's what actual humans would do.

Then there's about 30 minutes of pointless filler. There is all sorts of psychological manipulation that could have dialled up the tension, but instead it's just lazy cliches like old newspaper headlines and dream sequences that add nothing.

The ending is dreadful. I can understand why she shoots the first cop (who doesn't bother checking the room), but I don't understand how she ends up dying as the second cop just stands around like a sitting duck before opening the door that has magically removed the padlocks.

It's just a poor ending as a result of dreadful writing. I can only assume that the writer thinks the general public has a similarly mediocre grasp of plot and continuity as they do.