Disappearance

It seems that people either love or hate this movie. Personally i thought it was really exceptional for a TV horror movie. The people who dislike this movie are probably the people who thought The Blair Witch Project was scary.

Disappearance truly creeped me out, which is very difficult for a film to do. I watch just about every horror film out there and very few really "scare" me, but Disappearance comes very close to doing the deed.

You never see what is really the evil force throughout the movie, and i liked that a lot. Many horror films show the "monster" or "evil" or whatever you wish to call it later near the end to the film, or sometimes earlier. This strayed away from that and it leaves you wondering about what it really was. Plus, a family trapped in a ghost town in the middle of the desert makes an exceptional horror tale.

I thought the script, acting, and direction were all very well done. I also liked the music score a lot. There weren't any lame "happy pop" songs which seem to proliferate today's horror movies, and consequently make them all fail due to that fact. Disappearance went back to a direction of the old-school style creating a truly malevolent score for the movie.

I am very glad i rented this little gem, and will surely be adding this to my personal DVD collection.

Disappearance is about a couple who take their family on vacation in New Mexico and find themselves in deep trouble after taking a detour off the main highway to visit a town that was seemingly abandoned in 1948 for unknown reasons. The town of Weaver seems harmless at first and has tourist appeal until the family is stranded there overnight and they begin to have good reason to suspect that others have experienced their same predicament with fatal outcomes. The Henleys watch a Blair-Witch-Project-esquire video diary left by the town's last victim, which ironically demonstrates the best performance of anyone in this movie. Although Hamlin and Dey's performances are much better than the supporting casts', their emotional affect seems "flat" to me throughout the movie.

Disappearance has appeal for most of the movie as there is much suspense and good direction. However, the plot takes unexpected and implausible turns that seemingly make no sense. Worse yet it that there really is no understanding of what exactly is going on in the movie, which makes the bizarre ending less tolerable. It appeared to me that the movie makers were so focused on making a stream of suspenseful scenes, that they threw away all the elements of good story making: plot development, gradual explanation of themes and symbols that lead to a cohesive solution/outcome.

The most difficult aspect of the movie for me was that the first three-quarter of it was spent building up tension and curiosity about certain aspects of the plot that were then suddenly disposed of as if we didn't deserve an explanation:

What was the significance of the Indian symbols on the walls? What happened to the original people of Weaver? What was the connection with the people at the dinner? What did the Sheriff know? What did the missing boy discover if anything?

This was, I believe, a bad move, since it engendered some resentment. I had invested quite a bit of brainpower into hypothesizing some plausible explanations for some of these plot turns and strange events, only to have the movie makers simply end it without giving an answer to any of these things. These are some nice cliffhangers for the ending of a miniseries that is about to pickup again next week, but a totally frustrating and inappropriate ending for a stand-alone movie.

Well, although many have found otherwise, I found this film intriguing due to its inconclusive nature. If you have not seen this film, DO NOT READ THIS as your own conclusion is the whole basis of the film! I think part of the key to the story actually lies in the explosion, which in my opinion never happened. It is more likely however, due to major similarities with the Siberian Ball of Fire of 1908, that the explosion was meant to be a UFO crash (read up to see similarities, it is exactly the same)! Thus, the reference to Area 51. Therefore, I don't think the strange 'creatures' in the town were anything to do with aliens, more likely to be some humans, probably deformed that had mixed or breeded with an ancient Indian civilisation or had dabbled with the occult. The graves in my opinion were as a result of sacrafices concerning the occult, thus the 'creatures' making people disappear! The crow is very symbolic of this, and the human shaped skin also points in this direction. The ending does leave a little to be desired perhaps, although the crow taking the picture of the desert as the boy had done throughout the film gave some of it away.

What had quite happened at the end is not fully resolved, but the main puzzling thing is the sheriff in the nearby town. Leaving the man in the cell next to the fire in the town he denied the existence of had to be a trade for the missing boy, but he certainly was a very big part in the film, much bigger than most would think.

One idea of mine was that the nearby town was also a ghost town but I have given up thinking about it now!

Overall, 8 out of 10, a good film with an interesting story line, as long as you don't mind thinking about it!

We rented this film from our local store. Was disspointed that it wasn't a real movie, but a TV story transfered to DVD. The quality is pretty good, and the acting is adequate. In the very first scene, I thought it was really going to suck. When they start out, there is a large SUV driving in the desert with the family in it, and the obviouse reflection of the film truck in the vehicle was the worst I have ever seen. But then, the movie got better and better from there. It is a story about a family traveling through a desert region. They decide to spend some extra time in a ghost town and get caught up in an mystery. This is a well made "made for Tv movie". It was acceptable for our family and young teen age children. It is frustrating at points to see those characters behave in ways we think we would not. But thats entertainment. Its Family Vacation meets twilight Zone on a Pancake budget. The movie wraps up with a mysterious settlement of characters that is unanticipated as will as undefined. Some very high level thought going on there. It is a movie that seems familiar due to all the regular plot gratuities.

Overall, the movie was good. There wasn't much originality but a really big plus was given because there wasn't much violence. Don't get me wrong: I don't hate horror/mystery movies with gore, but it is a very refreshing change when a movie comes out with little or no violence. Yes, the end of the movie was open-ended but that was intended to leave the viewer's imagination run wild. For those of you who hate making sense of the ending and don't want to think up what happened...I came up with one. So, if you haven't seen this movie yet, please don't read the rest unless you want the ending to be spoiled for you. I've decided that the boy, Matt, who took pictures of everything became that black-bird...because, remember, at the very end we see the desert in the bird's point-of-view and then it takes a snapshot of it's view, like Matt would have. I'm thinking that the old man in the begining at the restuarant took the body of the little girl since at the very end she sees a motorcycle and says "Nice bike" as the old man looked at the family's car in the begining and says "Nice car." There's lots of symbolism in this. I'd also like to say that I think that there wasn't just one "creature." It was probably a cross between a bird and human. How else would things like that be able to walk and fly?

Good movie. Good ending.