Go.See.This.Movie
seriously
Its 7 am, 5 hours since I left the movie theater...Im still thinking about it..allow me to share my experience and ramble for a bit.
(there are no spoilers below)
I am not a person that gets scared by movies. I am one of those that finds the Friday the 13th's etc funny. Horror movies to me are predictable and do not affect me. There has been ONE movie in my life that has given me nightmares... Blair Witch. See I saw this movie before anyone found out it was fake, and the last 5 seconds is what gave me the willies...and nightmares, still to this day.
So, last week when my best friend said she was going to see it, I scoffed. First, it was a midnight showing on a work night and I get up every day at 430 to get ready to be at work at 6. Second, it was going to be cheesy, I just knew it. Third it was in a part of Atlanta I didnt really want to be in at that time of the morning.
Tuesday I decided to go, heck it was free, it was in a historical theater, and my friend would be there so I wouldn’t be alone, so I RSVP'd online and got my pass.
Yesterday, I went home from work and took a two hour nap so that I could stay awake for it, its the last sleep I've had.
Dave couldn’t go with me, so I left the house at 10 and drove to Atlanta to meet my girlfriend and another friend of hers. After accidentally turning down a wrong street and putting myself in the middle of a movie that’s being filmed here, I got to the theater. The Plaza is a very historic theater here (you can read about it here
http://www.plazaatlanta.com/HISTORY.html ) and I had never been there. The line for the movie had already started by the time I got there at 1040 and my friend was already there. Rather than piss anyone off, I told her to just wait for me when she got inside and I went to take my place at the end of the line and spent about 20 minutes chatting with the guys behind me in line about the fact that the theater was going to be showing Rodan on Saturday.
Wait and wait, hurry up and wait some more, take stock of all the different types of people in line and wait... finally they opened the doors and we made our way to the table to give our name and make sure we were on the VIP list and get our wrist bands and our coupon for free popcorn and drinks. After getting my refreshments, I walk back to the entrance for the screening room and am immediately mesmerized by an old school table version of Space Invaders. I wanted to play for old time sake, but the theater only holds 400 people and we wanted to get good seats.
I've never in my life been in a theater like this, the seats were really old and soft (too soft, my back is killing me) and rocked. It was like sitting in the rocking recliner my daddy had when I was a little girl.
The movie was scheduled to start at 12, so we sat for awhile chatting and people watching. Right before 12, someone with a microphone gets up and tells us they appreciate us being there, how to go about demanding the movie for other showings in the area and that after the movie there will be people in the lobby with computers to record our reviews to be posted on facebook.
The lights go out, and the screen comes to life. The first thing we see is a guy making sure to tell us this is not a "true story", and how its a "ghost story" and no good "ghost story" has CGI effects, and again a reminder to "demand" the movie for our area, the screen dims again for a minute and lightens again to mark the beginning of the most interesting 90 minutes of my movie going history.
I won’t in anyway give anything away, other than to say that evidently when Paramount and Dreamworks decided to release this, they changed the ending from the original screenings at the festival showings. I knew that from reading reviews, and now that I've seen it, I searched out the original end description. I'm torn, the end in the theater is the most "hollywood" thing about the movie and would love to see the original, but I don’t know how it would have affected me had I seen it first, hopefully it will be on the DVD when its released.
The premise of the movie is that a young couple is experiencing weird events in their house and Micah, the boyfriend, buys a state of the art video camera to document what is going on.
This movie was nothing that I expected and all I’ve ever wanted in a “scary” movie. It’s all about “it’s not what you see, it’s what you don’t see that scares you”. My track record of figuring things out has been shot. Every time I thought they were going to do something, it didn’t happen. It is like the very deliberately didn’t do any of the things that people would expect. There is no gore, nudity, or sex. What there is, is 90 minutes of anxiety and nervous breakdowns. It actually gave me chill bumps twice. While some parts are “chilling” while you’re watching it, the “scare” comes later, much like Blair Witch did for me. It is very much a psychological scare. When the movie was over the screen went dark and they didn’t bring up the lights for a few minutes. I do not know if this was deliberate or not, but it certainly had an affect on me.
Going home to a dark house at 230 am and having to walk thru it without lights (didn’t want to wake up Dave) was creepy, I preceded to get undressed in the dark and got into bed….and laid there with my head buried in Dave’s shoulder until the alarm went off at 430. You want to know what was creepier? I learned that my cats chasing each other on hardwood floors from one end of the house to the other in the wee hours of the morning
Sounds just like the “noise” in the movie when the activity was going to start.
Yeah, this movie is going to have an affect on me and while I think that’s awesome, someone finally managed to “get” to me, I’m really not looking forward to having to be at home alone for the 6 weeks that Dave is going to be in California lol
So, in closing, if you want blood, guts, cgi, arrows thru the neck while the guy screws the faked boobed blonde, this movie isn’t for you. If you want a movie that is unpredictable, and seems to do a good job of getting in you’re psyche, go to the website and “demand” it.
If Atlanta gets it, I will be there again, as a paying customer.