SYNOPSICS
Acolytes (2008) is a English movie. Jon Hewitt has directed this movie. Joel Edgerton,Michael Dorman,Sebastian Gregory,Hanna Mangan Lawrence are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2008. Acolytes (2008) is considered one of the best Crime,Drama,Horror,Mystery,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
James Tresswick and Mark Vincent are victims of a brutal bully Gary Parker who has maltreated both boys, marking their bodies and spoiling their young lives. In their last year of high school, James and Mark find a way to stop being victims. They're going to kill Gary; Wandering alone around an isolated forest - the suspected site of the disappearance of a local girl - 17 year old Mark strays upon an adult male filling in a trench. It's suspicious and tantalizing. Mark returns with his friend James and Chasley Keys and they bring shovels to exhume what will probably be rotting garbage or someone's dead pet - or so they tell themselves. They find the ghostly white body of a woman. She's a tourist - a Canadian backpacker. The "trench" is a grave. The "adult male" is her killer. And they've got him by the balls. Responding to Mark's intimations James floats an idea to seek out "the sicko". It'll be a bit of fun. He's confident the guy lives in their suburb; Mark saw his car parked on a ...
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Acolytes (2008) Reviews
Acolytes: Almost good
Acolytes is an Australian thriller, labelled an "Ozploitation" flick I'm still not 100% clear on what an exploitation flick truly is. It tells the story of a group of friends who blackmail a serial killer. Of course what could possibly go wrong there? It pretty much writes itself. The movie isn't bad, it just feels a tad disjointed and when the credits rolled there were still a couple of rather important plot points that hadn't been fully addressed and that's really rather frustrating. Starring Joel Edgerton in a career best performance as our antagonist this neat little thriller looks and sounds the part so it saddens me to say it didn't even remotely meet its potential. Perfectly watchable stuff but it just missed the mark a tad. I'm left feeling like if the film had an additional 30 minutes it could have been something special but this finished product feels like a book with a couple of chapters ripped out. Credit to all involved including the young cast, but it just didn't tick all the boxes for me. The Good: Decent soundtrack Hanna Mangan Lawrence and Joel Edgerton The Bad: Couple of unanswered questions Feels disjointed in places Things I Learnt From This Movie: The death of his wife clearly pushed Ned Flanders over the edge Australian teens are naturally more obnoxious than any other nationality
Acolytes: Almost good
Acolytes is an Australian thriller, labelled an "Ozploitation" flick I'm still not 100% clear on what an exploitation flick truly is. It tells the story of a group of friends who blackmail a serial killer. Of course what could possibly go wrong there? It pretty much writes itself. The movie isn't bad, it just feels a tad disjointed and when the credits rolled there were still a couple of rather important plot points that hadn't been fully addressed and that's really rather frustrating. Starring Joel Edgerton in a career best performance as our antagonist this neat little thriller looks and sounds the part so it saddens me to say it didn't even remotely meet its potential. Perfectly watchable stuff but it just missed the mark a tad. I'm left feeling like if the film had an additional 30 minutes it could have been something special but this finished product feels like a book with a couple of chapters ripped out. Credit to all involved including the young cast, but it just didn't tick all the boxes for me. The Good: Decent soundtrack Hanna Mangan Lawrence and Joel Edgerton The Bad: Couple of unanswered questions Feels disjointed in places Things I Learnt From This Movie: The death of his wife clearly pushed Ned Flanders over the edge Australian teens are naturally more obnoxious than any other nationality!
Painfully Contrived
This was a decent movie for the first half. Too many cheap BOO! moments but the tension builds, the bad guys are creepy and everything seems to be setting itself up nicely. The kids are not particularly deep but hey, that works for teens. Then it just gets ridiculous and tries way too hard- the "why in the world would he/they do that?" moments overwhelm anyone's capacity for suspension of disbelief, the twist involves too many ridiculous coincidences, and the title comes from a late attempt to philosophize some meaning into the film that goes nowhere and is quickly dropped. There was laughter in the theater at moments that were in no way supposed to be funny. Great premise but just badly written and doesn't hold together. Some very nice shots but they're hard to enjoy while you're rolling your eyes.
Unreasonable and Absurd Plot
The teenager Mark (Sebastian Gregory) has a crush on Chasely (Hanna Mangan Lawrence), who is the girlfriend of his best friend James (Joshua Payne) and is always teasing him. Mark and James share a secret: they were raped by the punk bully Gary Parker (Michael Dorman) when they were younger. While wandering in the woods, Mark witnesses a suspicious man with a shovel filling a hole and then sneaking from the place in a 4x4 Discovery with a butterfly cover on the spare tire. Mark tells James and Chasely and they return with shovels to dig the location, where they find the corpse of a woman. Instead of calling the police, they decide to find whether the killer lives. They discover that his name is Ian Wright (Joel Edgerton) and lives in the suburb with his wife and their baby. Mark and James blackmail Ian, ordering him to kill Gary Parker. However, the killer presses Gary and discovers the identities of the teenagers, reverting the situation and disclosing a dark secret about Mark. "Acolytes" has a promising beginning with the weird relationship among Mark, James and Chasey and their discovery of the grave of a Caucasian woman. The first unreasonable and absurd situation is when the trio does not call the police and decides to investigate the possible killer. However, the conclusion when Ian teams up with his acolyte is so stupid and unthinkable that irritates. My vote is five. Title (Brazil): "Caçada Sinistra" ("Sinister Hunting")
Interesting ideas in an exceptionally poorly executed film
Acolytes presents an interesting mix of original concepts in "screaming teen" cliché horror with a more thriller-like pacing. In some ways Acolytes is very successful, but in many other ways the film fails miserably. Overall Acolytes avoided the typical archetypes of the naivety and innocence of youth of endless horror films in the like of Cabin Fever, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and countless other films where unsuspecting and relatively naive and innocent teenagers, have sex, run around screaming and one-by-one are plucked off by some sort of monster. Instead this innocence is replaced with pride, retaliation, and arrogance. The characters had several opportunities to save themselves from immanent death and despair, but failed to do so due to their own personal demons. In the end you were left with the feeling that there were no (and perhaps are no) innocent victims. As the name implies, the film also touches greatly on following a leader or authority. This was used in a direct sense of if the main character would become like the serial killer and was also used less directly throughout the film. Following a central figure is a reoccurring theme throughout the film. Through all this, the film makers also incorporated a lot of cliché, which I suspect was intentional and gave the film a unique mixture of depth as well as shallowness which I found intriguing. This, perhaps inadvertently, plays well with the characters who are, at first appearance very shallow but as the story unfolds it becomes obvious that they are, at least the two main male characters, quite complex. Technically the film has a lot of problems however. The cinematography, which is typically regarded highly, I find rather sophomoric and over-stylized, utilizing formulaic 2/3 approaches far too rigidly. Many transitions I felt were also over-stylized. The use of symbolism was not only vague, but also greatly over used. The plot was poorly planned and relied exclusively on misinformation in order to achieve a rather hokey twist ending, which was poorly resolved and leaves viewers confused. Methods used to resolve the climax are cheap and ill-prepared, motivations are routinely unclear, and major plot points remain untied in the end. Overall, the film's relative originality, themes and thesis are lost in a maze of poor technical execution, over-stylized imagery, unclear motives, obtuse and unnecessary symbolism and cheap twists maintained only by a lack of or entirely incorrect information. If the film were better executed, it would have been excellent. However, Acolytes receives only two stars in my opinion.