Friday, November 30, 2012

Lovely Molly


Description from Netflix:
After moving into her deceased father's country house, Molly and her new husband Tim face eerie disturbances -- and things get worse as Molly faces them alone while Tim's away.  Soon the evil presence threatens both her sanity and her life.

Notable actors: Johnny Lewis, Alexandra Holden

My thoughts:
Going in, the only thing I knew about this was that it was written & directed by Eduardo Sanchez of The Blair Witch Project fame.  It looks like he hasn't completely given up on the found footage genre.  He didn't use it for this entire movie, but he used it quite a bit.  It felt pretty clumsy most of the time.  When Molly found herself being scared in the house, she would flick on the camera.  Because, of course, that's the natural reaction for all of us.


This movie started off pretty well.  There were a number of creepy parts that had me on edge.  The main actress - Gretchen Lodge - did a great job at slowly descending deeper and deeper into madness.  When the movie starts, she's a carefree bride.  But, as the movie progresses, she becomes more and more unstable.
We find out that she used to be a heroin addict, but has been clean for quite a while (I don't think they ever really say how long, but it's implied that she has been clean for several years).  As she slowly loses her mind, we're left wondering if she is possessed, or if it's just a relapse.  Either way, she's insane.
If I learned nothing else from this movie, I learned this: whether it's a possession or an addiction to heroin, you never kiss that kind of crazy.  Ever.


Okay.  Now the bad.  Somewhere in the middle, it pretty much lost me.  It reached a point where Molly's actions became so ridiculous I couldn't really take the movie seriously anymore.  It seemed like they were pushing it over-the-top because they wanted to be shocking.  There's a right way to do that.  This was not it.  They hit the crazy button too early, and they couldn't sustain it to the end.  It was no longer creepy.  And, when it lost me, it lost me for good.  There was nothing to drew me back in.
Sure, I still wanted to see how it ended (possession or drugs?), but it ceased being scary.  And, as it turns out, the ending wasn't even that good.  In fact, the big reveal made me laugh really hard.


I'm going to venture into some SPOILER territory here (complete with a picture), so, if you don't really want to know how it ends, you should probably skip it.  (Although I don't think it really spoils too much.  For me, this part was still open for interpretation.)

SPOILER ALERT

Towards the end, after Molly has exacted her bloody vengeance, she walks outside - stark naked - and encounters the demon who has been possessing her.  (I said earlier that I think this is still open for interpretation.  Even though we see the demon, I still get the feeling that it was in her head.  That it was all the heroin making her see things and act how she had been acting.)
And the demon looks preposterous.  It's like Sweetums from The Muppets lost weight and decided to start possessing hot blondes.  I laughed for a good 5 minutes.  (If you click on the picture, you should be able to see it a little larger.  Since he's in shadows, you don't really get a great look at him, but you can see enough of him to realize how stupid he looks.)


END SPOILER

As you can probably tell, I didn't love this movie.  But there are some pretty creepy moments in here.  I'd say it's worth a watch, but you can probably fast-forward through the last half of the movie and not really miss much.

Rating: 2.5/5

1 comment:

Fosterface said...

Thumbs up! I don't wind up watching a lot of these movies, but your reviews are often more entertaining than the movies are. This one's golden. The 'Sweetums' pic and analogy made me laugh, so I may watch this one just for that moment.