The Girl in the Photographs (2015) Reviews

• Completely incapable of creating suspense

  jtindahouse2016-04-14

  I was intrigued when I heard about 'The Girl in the Photgraphs' because it had an interesting title and a potentially interesting premise, with a chance of some mystery in the story. The synopsis on IMDb reads: "A bored young woman in a sleepy community called Spearfish starts receiving photographs of brutally murdered young women. Are they real or staged? The culprit is either a serial killer or some creep with a sick sense of humour." Sounds interesting enough - that is until the first scene in the entire movie answers the question, which just so happens to be the only thing the film could have had going for it. From then on it is just an abysmal mess, not worth anyone's time or effort. There are times where this film can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a horror movie or a romantic comedy. There is nothing wrong with taking the time to make your characters charming and likable but do it within the context of the movie. The uneven tone is so noticeable that it becomes incredibly off-putting and takes away any chance the film has to build any atmosphere or tension. In fact I can honestly say in the entire 95 minute runtime I never once felt the slightest emotion towards the movie. I was never worried for a character's safety, or charmed by the dialogue, or even for that matter got a single momentary fright. There is very little good here. Don't be fooled by a nicely made poster and a misleading synopsis. It's terrible.

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• Sinks from the long run time and lack of tension. ◆≈≈4.5/10≈≈◆

  Thrill_KillZ2016-04-01

  This film drowns in monotony as it ultimately leaves the viewer in a literal state of "can they please just kill these people so this film can end" for an extended amount of time, mostly the last twenty minutes of the film. Losing patience to such a degree means that all feeling for the cast has been lost or in this case never felt to begin with, this is obviously a big problem for a horror film when even the fate of the innocent young lead(Claudia Lee) loses importance. Nick Simon fails to create any atmosphere throughout as well as suspense and tension. There may have been a few small jolts of electricity, but they dissolve almost instantaneously. Despite being well produced, shot and acted with lots of pretty faces and even some nice T&A, this film just doesn't succeed in being what could have been a more engaging horror flick had some serious editing and script adjustment been applied. But in the end I'm still a horror junkie and I have to judge the overall package against it's fellow B horror competitors and there is enough here to possibly warrant some degree of entertainment for those with the same genre affliction, there were some OK kills and to be completely honest the picture the killers leave for the girl in the final seconds was brilliantly done, though a photo cannot undo the overall average plot and mundane feel to this film.

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• Worst.. Movie.. Ever..

  macnstash2016-09-24

  I created an IMDb account JUST to rate this movie the absolute worst rating. Characters, stupid. Plot, boring. Protagonist and antagonist, boring. Setting, boring. This movie and actors were sub par and were terrible wait not even terrible, terribad. If I really could take my 1hr30mins back I would. Sharknado 3 was way better than this anticlimactic piece of garbage. I dislike this movie thoroughly, so bad and painful to watch. 1 hour in I said I wanted to stop watching but it was so bad I had to see the ending. No satisfaction of the main character winning at all. Avoid if you don't wanna see cringe acting and bad endings.

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• Like looking through someones holiday snaps....

  FlashCallahan2016-05-01

  And to think that this was the last film that Wes Craven had any involvement in before his untimely death just adds to the all around naffness of the finished product. A killer sends a young woman photographs of his victims, which draws the attention of an arrogant celebrity photographer. The shutterbug and his entourage then head to the woman's small town to get closer to the mayhem...... The film awkwardly mixes humour with some really ropey horror and dialogue, and after an initially impressive opening which isn't unlike that opening scene in the wonderful 'Scream', it just goes downhill rapidly, despite some potential in a couple of characters. I'm really hoping that Cravens involvement was that of just the masked predators whom appear in windows and behind people, because these really are unnerving scenes, and if the film was focused more on them, rather than Kla Penn and his abhorrent entourage, it could have been something. Penn gets top billing in this, and on the one sheet, his name is above the title, just like Schwarzeneggars was back in the day. I mean really? apart from playing Kumar, and having a non speaking role in that awful Bryan Singer Superman film, what has he done? So apart from a couple of unnerving scenes, it's a failure on every level, it provides us with no tension, no reason for what the protagonists/antagonists are doing, and we are treated to some silly Scooby Doo ending. Don't bother.

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• I want a slasher revival to happen so bad. This is not helping the cause.

  horrorinpureform2015-09-18

  After having just seen the other Oz Perkins-written 2015 horror film February, and adoring it, I was hoping for a similarly well-crafted film here, with a nuanced screenplay which dares to contribute to the horror genre in new ways. Got the opposite - an extremely low-concept, poor execution slasher. I hope he follows the path of that other film in the future. A grocery store checkout clerk keeps having mysterious photographs of murdered and mutilated women left for her to find around her workplace and other locations. Seven of them so far. The cops think it is "art" so they don't bother doing absolutely anything about it (what?) at any point, even after the girl is stalked (what?). Then some famous photographer and his posse of models comes to town because he's "inspired" by these photographs, and wants to recreate them. Then slasher. I'll just get the biggest problem out of the way - this slasher has absolutely zero tension. I feel like it tries to heavily borrow from better films, but achieves only lifeless recreations which fail to understand how to create tension. Most obviously this was clearly inspired by the Strangers, down to the masks. So expect a LOT of scenes that make zero sense if examined from a "why would anyone do this other than for the camera" perspective. Like the villains just lurking randomly in the background and appearing and disappearing and so on and so forth. On top of that, the setups are SO common that the viewer is always five seconds ahead of the characters in peril - you will be able to, with 100% accuracy, predict every single time a villain will appear and disappear in the background. Every, single, time. The characters were supposed to be funny (I think), but weren't my cup of tea. The secondary cast were decent actors, just not given much to work with. The main actress just looked annoyed throughout the entire film. Her range was "very angry" to "only moderately angry". The villains were just awful. Were they going for farcical? They seemed to do random creepy things for the sake of it. It was just an amalgamation of one dimensional "gross" ideas to try to convince us of how deranged the characters are, which just made them comical and a parody. The nail in the coffin was the final scene."Horror 101", obvious from the beginning, standard "last chill". This movie did not take itself seriously at all and it did not bode well for the concept. It wouldn't be a bad concept if developed further, but should have tried for a serious and tense tone, because it could have been far more interesting. Upsides? Decent gore, and two or three funny lines hanging on for dear life in an otherwise mostly-witless sea of dialogue.

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