Review of Amusement (2008) by Brett B — 03 Sep 2016

AMUSEMENT is one odd little movie. Divided into four chunks, the movie often has the feel of an anthology; even though there is an overarching narrative tying everything together, the individual segments all feel incredibly different from each other, as well as mostly disconnected until we learn what is really going on in the story.

As a consequence, there's an unguessable, unknowable quality to the thing, as the trajectory is virtually impossible to predict, which is kind of fun (though fans of PROM NIGHT or TERROR TRAIN will likely have a bit of a handle on what the whole thing's about).

It's both a good and bad thing that the first segment is unquestionably the strongest, as it drops us into the action immediately (so much so that it feels more like the climax of a totally different movie than it does the prologue to this story) and has a level of energy that the rest of the movie never fully recaptures.

It's almost a WHEN A STRANGER CALLS situation, which is another movie that peaks in the opening 20 minutes and never hits those highs again. The ultimate revelation of what's going on is wildly implausible for a number of reasons, but we basically just have to roll with it.

Ultimately, the component sequences are just a little too disjointed to allow the connective tissue to fully unite them into a cohesive whole, but the attempt is ambitious, and taken on their own, the segments are neat.

It's an entertaining watch, certainly.