THE 13th FRIDAY * U.S.A. 2017 Dir: Justin Price 95 mins
When a group of friends enter a house possessed by a demon they end up being drawn into a deadly game that requires 13 sacrifices to appease the demon. When they fail in this task the demon turns its attention to the group itself. This is littered with hundreds of references to so many horror movies both the classics and the not so. With levitations straight out of The Exorcist, a puzzle box from Hellraiser, numerous (awful) jump scare attempts and a twisted/crawling Samara type figure from The Ring, it has everything you’ve already seen in every recent horror movie with the added bonus of it being totally devoid of any originality or talent.
The story, dialogue and acting is appalling throughout but more so at the beginning where you have absolutely no clue what the fuck is going on as they are trying to cram too much in at once. Its okay though because the actors/characters have no appeal or personality (most of the female characters have that look on their faces like they smelled something weird and can’t quite figure out where its coming from) so you couldn’t give a shit if they lived or died. I was just hoping they would all die horribly and quickly so I could get on with my life. That hope was quashed too as they used an awful lot of terrible CGI, the blood and kills were rather sparse and disappointing. The other visual CG effects were again crap and unnecessary, why they felt the need to CGI in a perfectly normal house spider I have no idea. Apart from the awful visuals the make up in the possessed scenes were quite good and this is the reason for awarding it its lowly one star. The music is misleading and tries far too hard to create suspense when there is fuck all going on and then where you would expect some kind of build up there is nothing just some very gormless actors staring at a rocking chair moving on its own with no reaction what so ever, its really rather infuriating. Directed and written by Justin Price who also did Alien: Reign Of Man, which I have also reviewed, I’m disappointed to report that this is no bettter. I am astounded by its IMDb rating and the positive review’s as I am at a total loss to find anything good about this movie at all, this is one I hope I will never have to revisit and I will now be avoiding anything that bears this directors name.
Review by Sarah Budd
