Synopsis: In the 1980s, college student Samantha Hughes takes a strange babysitting job that coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret and as the night goes on, it becomes clear that Samantha is a much bigger part of the plans for the evening than she would ever want to be.I've got to be honest, I probably had too high of expectations for this film after seeing the trailers and hearing all the positive buzz about it. I really should have known better.
I do absolutely love the way it's just a straight-up throwback to the old 70s grindhouse type films and it succeeds on this level very well. It replaces all the CGI blood and gore with classic tension and character building. In this sense, it's very well made.
My problem is that it's just so slow and dull. There's only a couple of shocks or scares in the entire film and it's really drags out what is probably a 30 minute story into a 90 minute film. I'm not one of those A.D.D. horror fans either as I love some of the movies this films owes itself too, like The Wicker Man (the original), The Omen and Rosemary's Baby. They're also very moody and atmospheric with a slow building sense of tension. The problem here for me was that it was too slow building and then the payoff was a bit of a letdown.
Jocelin Donahue played the lead and I loved her and thought she did a fantastic job. The girl who played her best friend... not so much. Some other potentially good characters weren't on screen enough to leave much impact. Tom Noonan was great, but he may have had 10 minutes of actual face time. Dee Wallace must have had a total of 3 minutes at the most. Such a waste.
Again though, I love the way this film looked and felt. Also the house was fantastic and quite the scene stealer itself. But overall I still think it's a good horror film that's a bit too slow for my tastes to ever be great. It tries to be an homage to good 70s horror but ends up being nothing much more than a 70s made-for-TV movie with a bit of blood.
6/10
