The Legend of Bloody Mary (2008)

Ryan (Paul Preiss) has been suffering nightmares ever since the disappearance of his sister Amy (Rachel Taylor) five years prior.  Now a senior in college it is affecting his relationship with his girlfriend Rachel (Irina Costa) as well as his ability to attend school.  It seems that Amy and her friends were taken by Mary Worth (Caitlin Wachs) while playing a game similar to Bloody Mary, only where they write their name and the names of others they wish to "mark" on the mirror before summoning her.

The increase in Ryan's nightmares corresponds with the finding of a mass grave on campus that may provide validity to the legend.  Mary Worth is accused of adultery in the 1600s and refuses to reveal the name of the father of her illegitimate child.  The father also refuses to take responsibility, resulting in Mary being shackled to a tree and repeatedly cut across the face with broken pieces of a mirror until the silent husband finally kills her - and then later kills everyone in the village to present Mary's curse from coming true.  It seems she used the last of her life essence to transport herself into a world inside the mirror.

Father O'Neal (Robert J. Locke), a former professor of Ryan's, decides to help him out and begins to believe that the legends are true.  With Ryan's help he begins to devise a method of ending Mary's reign of terror forever.

I have had a surprising run of good to great movies this year.  Still, all good things must come to an end, as it does with an audible crash while watching this.  I honestly would rather watch a group of street mimes perform an unabridged King Lear set against a background of moose flatulence than ever be subjected to something like this again.  The acting seems like everyone involved was given a chance to read their lines once, handed a quaalude and told to recite it in one take.  Honestly - we're not taking purposeful detached acting like in a David Lynch movie, but something that could have been accomplished just as easy with those creepy pre-made cartoon bots with robot voices that people like to play with.

What's worse is that if some thought had been given to hiring decent actors and maybe taking more time to learn to direct beyond simply reading the instructions that came with the camera, a polished up version of this would make a decent movie.  You've got the usual horror revenge themes, some characters that could have been entertainingly campy if played right and the possibility (ruined in this movie, of course) of auxiliary villains. Instead, we get the type of thing that justifies the love many of us have for some of the worst directors.  We can point to movies like this as evidence that at least they didn't make this.

The Legend of Bloody Mary (2008)
Time: 93 minutes
Starring: Paul Preiss, Robert J. Locke, Caitlin Wachs
Director: John Stecenko


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more