Review of The Curse of Downers Grove (2015) by Quincytheodore — 22 Aug 2015

A weak pretentious stalker movie masked as horror with creepy title.

Let's get the premise clear, there is barely any curse in this movie. It only used as a pretext to shoehorn script made of Facebook cheesy one-liners from a typical teenager's page. The movie is shallow and barely presents any thrill at all, it merely produces predictable story with abundance of flamboyant dialogues that only serve as lackluster musing.

Chrissie is a senior high school student at Downers Grove. There's a strange curse that a senior will die before graduation. It creates a sort of Final Destination foreshadowing at start, but this curse is far-fetched to say the least. The story is a straight forward, slow-moving stalker cliché and despite its relatively short runtime, the movie feels highly tedious.

Chrissie uses monologues a lot, as in almost every five minutes. When she's not doing that, she's spewing commentary about life or religion. It's an effort to give this average brunette female lead some depth to her character so audience would invest on her. Unfortunately, her bantering sounds authentic, almost to the point of reading from cat poster.

She even delivers monologue on the scenes where she has no business in. This gets old fast since it sounds preachy and self-righteous. It doesn’t help when the other characters are too one-dimensional, probably in the exception of her younger brother who reminds me of young John Connor. The actors perform their characters rigidly and even though the movie tries to give mystery about them or the near irrelevant curse, you'll see the twist from miles away.

For a movie with grim title of The Curse of Downers Grave, it is incredibly feeble and timid. I guess Cheap Scream Knock-off wouldn't generate any interest, but unfortunately that's what this movie is.