Review of The Dark and the Wicked (2020) by Bdrtfm — 15 Mar 2021

This is getting rather old. A movie with a story that I could do a better job at writing gets rave reviews because some people forget that horror films are supposed to be scary, not just filled with a string of bizarre, senseless scenes stitched together.

There is nothing scary about this movie. I watched it alone in the dark and I was constantly looking at the time to see how much longer it was going to drag on. Everything you see in the movie, you've seen before.

Little of it makes any sense. The beginning is OK, the middle is tedious and the ending is the usual bad, ambiguous, create your own story ending we see in most movies these days. Apparently the Devil wants some old farmer's soul for some inexplicable reason (we're never given a reason why this particular old man except that the family doesn't believe in God and he's estranged from his kids - usually the opposite type of person a demon is after in most movies.

..) and the omnipotent demon will do whatever it takes to get it, except kill the old man. Make the mother kill herself? Sure. Make the son kill himself? Sure. Make the helpful neighbor kill himself? Sure.

Make the respite worker kill herself? Sure. But kill the old man who has hours left to live? Not a chance. Apparently, killing healthy young people is as simple as riding a bike but killing an old man and taking his soul is HARD.

I guess the moral of the story is that evil is everywhere and when it wants you, just lay down and die because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. For me, the most important part of a movie is the story.

Everything else depends upon it. Lately, more and more movies are relying on atmosphere, symbols and music and the story is just an afterthought. Nobody can write a good ending anymore let alone a good movie so they rely on ambiguity and strings of bizarre imagery to let the viewer come up with their own idea of what the writer/director was trying to say or achieve.

The fact that there are almost as many theories as there are viewers goes to show that the writer/director wasn't going for anything at all. They just shot a bunch of footage and hope you can imagine some awesome meaning behind it all.