The Attic (2008)

DVD

So how's this for a story... A girl thinks an evil version of herself is haunting an old house and slowly begins going crazy from it... Wait, wait! I'm not done yet... Now that you have the foundation, you take out all of the suspense, all of the horror, toss in some awful direction and editing and finally dabble a little clich&#233 here and there... And well... There you have it! What do you think of it? Think it's epic enough? Oh, you hate it? Well... In all honesty, I don't like it one bit either, but that's the exact sort of dribble we've got slopping down the mouth of this ridiculously bad "horror" flick.

The Attic tells the story I basically (and sarcastically) summed up in the above paragraph; a young girl believes she's being haunted by an evil twin and is afraid to wander outside because of it. Yes, there are some little "twists" tossed about (namely the questionable finale), but this film is really just about a possibly crazy girl bickering with her family, her mentally retarded brother and well... Anyone that tries to help her.

But as we know, it takes more than just a clich&#233d and boring plot to make a film truly bad, and well, this one definitely has a handful. For one, I'm not sure whose idea it was to improvise certain moments (look for the argument between the lead girl and her psychiatrist), but geez... They need to make sure that whoever is improvising, is good at it. It's blatant that some of the dialogue is built this way due to the awful repetition of words and pure redundancy of some of the statements. Don't get me wrong though, the script is still bad; it's just made worse by this choice of direction (or lack thereof). And while I will commend some of the acting, I can honestly say I've never seen such an assortment of both over and under-acting. And it's sad too, because some of the actors (like the lead actress), really do poor their heart into some of the more "difficult" scenes.

Along with the script and acting, the direction and editing here is just piss-poor. Yes, the director did do Pet Cemetery (Mary Lambert), but apparently anything learned about film back then, has been completely forgotten here. Direction is ill-consistent and the editing is all over the place (especially during the scenes involving ghost attacks and such). Confusing jump cuts also mar the "scary" bits of the movie as they serve to do nothing more than confuse the viewer in all of the wrong ways.

The Attic pretty much fails on just about every level of horror... It's not even so bad it's good... It's just so bad it's boring... Really, the only interesting thing I found this movie contained was a character that looked like the spawn of Clint Eastwood and Casper Van Dean (you know, the Starship Troopers guy)... Yep, that's really it.

Thank God... Nothing here.

There's nothing here to even warrant a rental... Nothing at all... Awful direction, editing and scripting only serve to reinforce that fact.