Review of Dread (2009) by Saint 1 — 02 Jun 2010

I love Clive Barker. He's up there in my top 5 of horror writers. But that said, he is very hard to translate to film. His stories are usually filled with a balance of hyper-sexuality and intense gore.

That said, this movie was a surprising find. Being the third Books of Blood movie (technically... though they had translated several of the stories over the years...), I was happy to find and dig into this tale of a film student's study into dread.

However, there are some things that I didn't care for with it, mostly the lighting, which was pretty inconsistent and God-awful... especially when colors seemed to be a focus. You just couldn't see what the hell was happening half the time.

Also, as much as I applaud the movie for not going the typical boo-scare, excessive gore route and focusing more on atmosphere, I felt it took way too long to get to the point of it, and then when it finally does, it's over.

But aside from that there are a lot of good things to be had. Jackson Rathbone was a nice surprise here, however not seeing him in anything Twilight probably made it a lot easier to handle. There's some twists and turns the movie takes that are handled very well, too.

However, I feel like the story itself could have been handled better in someone else's hands, but that's just me.