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Christina's House is just attractive enough to keep you watching and wondering. That's important, because in terms of terror and tension almost nothing happens for the first hour. I say almost nothing, when in fact three girls are murdered. You hardly see these attacks, maybe a girl screams and is yanked off camera. Still, as I said, enough to interest, especially with a few other weird goings on. There's a problem here with the naturalness of the Direction, acting and script, particularly some of the all teen scenes. Then the movie comes across as a little like a TV movie. The solid last half hour is pretty worthy though, a sort of Stephen King bizarre. The soundtrack was good, but timid. The filmmaker could have easily upped the tension by increasing his reliance on sound. There were two minor plot holes. The first is when the father rushes home upon discovering the identity of an intruder, straight past a cop car with a cop inside whom could have helped. Nor did he bother to ring the cops. OK, blind with worry. The second is the age old one, where the lead knocks out the intruder but fails to deliver a killer blow in her mad rush to find her brother. OK, adrenaline, simply didn't think. Movie reactions are often creatively splitting hairs for more drama. Still. There's enough material here for a really great modern remake. I'm going to hope for that. Christina's House is original enough to make it safe to watch if you like teen horror, and it's certainly an interesting example of the genre for its day.
score 6/10
robertemerald 19 January 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5419795/ |
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9-3-2021 06:05:10