The Legend of Bloody Mary (2008)

Director:

John Stecenko

Writers:

Dominick R. Domingo (writer)
John Stecenko (writer)

Genre:

Horror | Thriller

Tagline:

I Believe in Mary Worth

Plot:

Ryan has been plagued with nightmares since the night his sister Amy went missing 8 years earlier after...

Plot Keywords:

College | Witch | Priest | Ghost | Nudity

Cast

Paul Preiss	...	Ryan
Robert J. Locke	...	Father O'Neal
Caitlin Wachs	...	Mary Worth
Nicole Aiken	...	Nicole
Brittany Miller	...	Jen
Rachel Taylor	...	Amy
Stephen Macht	...	Magistrate
Irina Costa	...	Rachel
Dean O'Gorman	...	Reverend Whittaker
Cooper Campbell	...	Clair
Joseph Domingo	...	Detective Romano
Elissa Dowling	...	Mary Winters
Jackie Kreisler	...	Mary Worth Corpse
Kristen Dalto	...	Maggie
Joseph Battaglia	...	Young Ryan

MPAA:

Rated R for some violence, language and sexuality/nudity.

Runtime:

93 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo (RCA Sound System)

Certification:

USA:R

Filming Locations:

Long Island, New York, USA

Company:

MK4 Productions

Direct-to-DVD low-budget teenage flick

The title of my review pretty much sums it up, but since I have to write at least 10 lines, here goes. You will not want to watch this movie if you want to see: 1.) fast pacing at any moment in the movie, 2.) fluent dialogue, 3.) smooth editing, 4.) good acting, 5.) suspenseful build-ups, 6.) more or less stable image that doesn't induce seasickness, 7.) good CGI.

I also can't recommend this movie to people susceptible to claustrophobia, because half of the time the camera is pretty much shoved almost into the faces of the actors for no reason whatsoever. It gives the feel that everything was recorded in rooms barely large enough to hold both the actors and the filming crew.

There are some scenes of people walking and driving cars, with no other apparent purpose than to lengthen the duration of the movie, even though the pacing is already sleep-inducing on its own. Some of these scenes are accompanied by music that feels out of place, unless you accept that this movie is geared towards a young teenage audience.

The whole thing feels like separate parts which were just concatenated, without any attempt to get the pacing right. I'm not just talking about the different scenes, even within a single scene it's as if they recorded all the actors sequentially, making them say all their lines at once, and then interleaved these video streams. As a result, there are frequent unnatural and awkward pauses between sentences.

And then there's the shaky cam, which is used at all the wrong moments. During a simple conversation between two characters, it's as if the camera man gets progressively more drunk and eventually is unable to track his subject even though it's sitting still in a chair.

Even the sound has a low-budget quality to it. The clearly audible different background noises on the dialogue of actors in the same scene support my theory that each actor acted all their lines sequentially. They could at least have mixed some extra consistent background noise over the entire scene to mask this.

My threshold for a movie that has something still making it worth watching is 5/10. I give this one a 3. There were some scenes that came remotely close to being scary, and the historical parts looked pretty good. But for the rest it felt like the filming project of a bunch of high school kids.