I saw this at FrightFest in London and was engaged right up to the final reel where things came a bit unglued.
The film deals with an estranged daughter coming home to visit her father and step-family at their ancestral manor. A building storm cuts off the power and an aborted party in the hay-barn is moved to the house, where the family discover that something *else* has crept into the house ahead of them.
There follows a horror genre cat-and-mouse chase around the house interior where the group of youths are steadily picked off by the monstrous invader during their efforts to contact the authorities and call for help.
Much of this section of the film is quite tense and well-played and this second reel is where I found most enjoyment. The creature responsible for the mounting chaos is never shown (other than a clever Gollum-style silhouette in one shot) and works for the film rather than against, leaving imagination to fill in the blanks.
Only in the final act of the movie do we learn the origin of the creature (although this particular twist is not difficult to see coming much earlier in the movie) and see it in more detail, which is where things fall down a bit.
When budgets are tight, prosthetics and animatronics typically suffer - the visual effects for the creature are a bit wobbly (which shouldn't really matter that much if the editing is tight or evasive) and although the body count is high and the corpses are suitably eviscerated and mangled (with probably the best effects of the movie) somehow the revelation of the responsible party left me feeling flat. Many of the actual murders also happen off-screen or in cut-away, which was another source of frustration for a horror fan.
Ultimately, this is a decent movie and the second act is where all the tension is rooted, but I found the ending lacking something. At the festival, the director explained they only had something like 18 days to shoot which would certainly impact on the final film.
If you like monster movies and have a free hour and a half, you could do a lot worse than watch 13Hrs.
The film deals with an estranged daughter coming home to visit her father and step-family at their ancestral manor. A building storm cuts off the power and an aborted party in the hay-barn is moved to the house, where the family discover that something *else* has crept into the house ahead of them.
There follows a horror genre cat-and-mouse chase around the house interior where the group of youths are steadily picked off by the monstrous invader during their efforts to contact the authorities and call for help.
Much of this section of the film is quite tense and well-played and this second reel is where I found most enjoyment. The creature responsible for the mounting chaos is never shown (other than a clever Gollum-style silhouette in one shot) and works for the film rather than against, leaving imagination to fill in the blanks.
Only in the final act of the movie do we learn the origin of the creature (although this particular twist is not difficult to see coming much earlier in the movie) and see it in more detail, which is where things fall down a bit.
When budgets are tight, prosthetics and animatronics typically suffer - the visual effects for the creature are a bit wobbly (which shouldn't really matter that much if the editing is tight or evasive) and although the body count is high and the corpses are suitably eviscerated and mangled (with probably the best effects of the movie) somehow the revelation of the responsible party left me feeling flat. Many of the actual murders also happen off-screen or in cut-away, which was another source of frustration for a horror fan.
Ultimately, this is a decent movie and the second act is where all the tension is rooted, but I found the ending lacking something. At the festival, the director explained they only had something like 18 days to shoot which would certainly impact on the final film.
If you like monster movies and have a free hour and a half, you could do a lot worse than watch 13Hrs.