This has been on my “to watch” list since I knew it was coming out. I am happy to sit down and enjoy this. It is well rated, so hopefully, it won’t disappoint. WWE Studios put this out, and most of their movies have sucked. I’m looking your way, Barricade and See No Evil 2.
We have 2 kids and they are terrified. They see an adult female with glowing eyes. Then a young man shoots the girl. This was all a dream. So this guy was in a mental institution and is getting released on his 21st BDay. We see the redhead girl, I assume it is her grown up. This mirror is up for auction and the auctioneer looks incredibly familiar. So redhead is named Kaylie, and her brother is Tim, the one getting discharged. She gives him a check and his cut of the estate. She says that he can stay with her until he gets his own place. SO I get distracted to look the lead actress up, ya know, to see if she’s done nudity (she has), and I missed the last part of the conversation. So she tells him that she found it, meaning the mirror. She says that they have a few days….to keep their promise and kill it.
11 years earlier
So, mommy is a redhead and daddy isn’t. All the gingers in this, I expect a lot of rage.
Back to Present
Tim is happy to be in a little hotel room. Kaylie is hellbent on doing it tomorrow night, and she wants his help.
Past
The fuck is this? Mom is standing in front of a mirror with a shirt open in the front all the way down, but covering her tits, and she is wearing panties, and staring at her C Section scar. Are you guys serious? Dad is up in the middle of the night, and keep in mind, the family just moved in. He sees the figure from the opening with the glowing eyes. He investigates his office, sees nothing, and we hold extra long on the mirror for no real reason. I am so sick of this whole “nothing can be scary” horror movement.
Present
Kaylie goes to the room and up to the mirror and she turns around, gets choked by her husband, and it’s all just a dream. She promises her husband that things will stop being weird in a few days. She is in the room with the mirror. So he uncovers it and says “you must be hungry”. No, I’m not. She wonders if the mirror crack still hurts. She sees 3 things that look like bodies under sheets and they are moving their heads. She looks back, nothing. Mirror, they moving. So she goes to them and the first 2 are statue heads, and just as she is about to uncover the 3rd, the moving guy predictably comes in, startles her. She smiles and tells the mirror that she looks forward to seeing her later. Tim and Kaylie are going to meet at “the house”. I do like the pacing so far of this.
Past
Dad stares at the mirror in his office. The kids are playing outside. young Kaylie gets close to dad’s window and sees a woman rubbing dad’s chest. Then she gets shot by her brother playing laser tag. Young Kaylie is whining about how all of her friends have a phone, but she doesn’t. Yeah, life is hard. Kaylie asks Dad who the lady was in his office and mom is playing along, and he has no idea what they are talking about.
Kaylie meets Tim at the house, and she has a dog that she calls “dog”. Hey, that’s what I did. I miss Dogg (those who don’t know me personally, Dogg was my pet for over a decade). She gets him to help her bring the mirror into the house. Oh no, a camera is set up. NOOOOOO. I am so sick of cameras being set up. She at least has 2 cameras and computers hooked up and is going to be all professional. She has 3 cameras, all set up on different power sources. Woah woah woah. She has this thing up on the ceiling which looks like a dumbbell hanging. She has separate landlines for the computers. She has alarms set for every 45 minutes to change the tapes, every hour to eat, some food and water. Each room has a separate thermostat and any temperature change of over 5 degrees will set off an alarm. Her mission is to prove that this mirror is home to a supernatural entity. She says that this entity is responsible for 45 deaths over the past 4 centuries. She keeps calling the mirror the “lasser glass” and I am probably misspelling that, but to look for its proper spelling may spoil the film, so lasser it is. She gives the full history of the mirror. Her fiancee is to call her every hour on the hour as another precaution. They picked a good actress for this, very pretty face and eyes. She notices a dog in there, not the same dog that she brought it. They about growing up. Tim says his dad was a sick and twisted abusive man who killed their mom. We find out that Tim killed their dad because he was torturing and killed their mom. Tim wants to smash it, and we see as kids, they tried to and failed, so she tells him to try to break the mirror. One person tried to once, and he got killed shortly after by walking into traffic. OK, the dumbbell thing is an anchor set on a timer to go off and impale whatever. This bitch is crazy. Dare I say, I like her.
Past
Dad has a nasty habit of chewing his fingernails and put a band-aid on earlier. He is a software designer and works at home. SO he is typing away, and most of you have experienced this at some point, the band-aid is just annoying him. He takes it off. He looks down, it’s back on. He can’t get it off. He uses a staple remover to get it off, and then see that it was off all along and that he just ripped his nail completely off. Ouch!!!! He puts a new band-aid on. He brings his kids into the office and his books are all on the floor in a pattern, and he says that he told them not to play around in his office. The kids are clueless. He says that he can hear that playing around at night. He also mentions their mother’s plants.
Present
Apparently plants have issues staying alive in the house. She covers up the dog’s cage. He sees a dead dog at his feet, the same dog we saw earlier that wasn’t hers.
Past
This dog was their pet. Dad has bought a gun for protection. Mom is mad. She leaves and she hears dad say Grotesque cow. He denies saying it. Mom wakes up to the dog barking at the door. She goes to open the door and the dog bites her hand. She asks Dad if he was going to do something about the barking and he is clueless. The next day, dad asks the kids to stay out of his office. The dog wanted outside, mom let him outside. The kids are playing on the other side of the house. Dog barks, wants in, mom can’t open the door. She has locked the dog in dad’s office. Dad gets home, no dog.
Present
Tim says that she’s remembering it wrong, and well that’s the whole point of this film, right? Everybody perceives something different, right? Tim thinks he has all the answers, the dog was sick from the same thing that kills the plants.
This is hard to blog about with so many oddities. I’m just going to kick back, watch it, and eat a taco. I’ll update when cool shit happens.
So here’s the thing, I finished it.
End Film
Had I gave a rating at around the hour mark, I would have been at a 7.0. Unfortunately, this movie got to a point where it dragged on and on and on when we knew full well what the ending would be. I mean, maybe some didn’t, but it felt predictable to me, and that’s ok. If predictability was a bad thing, horror wouldn’t exist. Every Friday the 13th, we know the lead girl is going to overcome Jason at the end. That’s fine. I loved the shifting of time concept at first, but it was like buying a 3-year-old a toy that has 4 buttons that all make noise. By the time you are home, you are all ready to throw that obnoxious thing out. If I can walk away with something, I will say that anybody that argues and says that it was definitely the mirror, I vehemently disagree and actually feel that the movie is better if you think that Kaylie never got proper treatment and counseling growing up, and Tim does. So Time is rationally explaining everything to her, using the couch example, that to me is the director saying that she is trying to really convince us this shit is real, but the couch example is the most logical thing in the whole film. So, watch the film again, consider that both kids were abused, and developed mental issues, they saw some bad shit, and like kids, they both told each other the bad shit, their vivid imaginations ran wild, and boom, this film. It’s way cooler than some stupid scary mirror, right? I also want to say, I loved the dad in this, the actor was really the shining star of this film, and the mom was good too.
Final rating: 6.2
All the pictures used in this blog are for review purposes. They are the property of:
- Intrepid Pictures (presents)
- MICA Entertainment (in association with) (as MICA Entertainment, LLC)
- WWE Studios (in association with)
- Blumhouse Productions (as BH Productions)
- Lasser Productions (copyright holder) (as Lasser Productions, LLC)
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