Film Review: Cold Creepy Feeling (2010)

SYNOPSIS:

A young couple, Lisa Younger and Jared Vandenberg, escape the Los Angeles rat race for the quiet life in Joshua Tree, California but paranormal visions and voices quickly turn the house of their dreams into a house of nightmares. They enlist the help of a spiritualist, Alex Damiano, to help exorcise the premises but this only awakens and angers the demonic presence that lurks within. When the town Sherriff, Dennis Woodruff, becomes involved, he discovers that another family mysteriously disappeared 10 years earlier without a trace and he also becomes entangled in the web of evil horror

REVIEW:

I have a cold creepy feeling that this movie sucked. It really did and I really wanted it to be good, fortunately there’s really only one person to blame. Keith Kurlander, the 1 man show- writer director, producer, editor, light flipper, doll painter.

The beginning starts off strong and creepy overlaying the home video with creepy music and a night vision lady scaring the crap out of you. All right! I like the first person camera movies if they’re done well and this seems like it’s headed in the right direction. I like the tone, I like the concept and I’m curious to know more. You got me. Lets make it happen.

Then it doesn’t. Literally nothing happens for a long time. It does give me a nice look at what it would be like if I were to ever buy a home and live in whatever town this was that I would never go visit on my own. I also feel like the Travel Channel could have summed it all up in 22 minutes. The story takes place in Joshua Tree, California which is apparently a desert, one horse town, somewhere outside of L.A. I don’t really get why a couple in the film industry would want to seclude themselves from one of the biggest job markets in the country, but I might have dozed off during the scene where they made that decision. My favorite scene is where they drive home from the rock park in silence for about a minute nothing happens. Seriously time it- one minute- nothing. No dialogue, no scary sh*t, not even the boring desert scenery changes.

It gets jarring and confusing with the 3 different cameras. I’m not sure what the goal was there. I understand the handheld, but why the 2 different styles? And if they weren’t 2 different cameras shooting then there was a big mistake in the editing or lighting. This is where a crew would be helpful and be able to set up the shot, while the director blocks and then action and we have some consistency. We also have someone to say “Hey, nothing is really happening in this movie. Should we do something about that?”

The acting is great by the two leads and extremely terrible by the spiritualist and cop. The dog steals the show from his scenes. What is the point of his character anyway? I feel like they could’ve had the other lady come back for the last scene instead of incorporating a whole new person who they need to drive around in a bondo covered ‘cop car’ and add a scene of him eating pickles for some reason.

You would think that if nothing is going to happen within the movie that will scare anyone then you should at least have some conflict for the couple with each other. Or both! Conflict needs to happen to drive along a story and this one ends up sputtering on the side of a deserted road.

Now this movie would have been great as a short, but they tried to expand the minimal conflict into a feature length movie which just doesn’t work. Everything that was supposed to be scary in this movie just isn’t and unless it was a joke would people really refer to something as a cold creepy feeling?

Pretty retarded if you ask me. Granted the producer is not going to tell the director to change anything when they’re the same person, which is why people should build a team and this project could have been really solid instead of looking like I just found my friends video footage from a house they bought in bum-f*ck California.

Cold Creepy Feeling (2010)