Let's Be Evil

source: Let's Be Evil

Where to begin, this movie is utterly a piece of garbage in almost every way imaginable. The only redeeming quality is the soundtrack, which has an 80s vibe similar to Stranger Things and It Follows. The Plot was incredibly disjointed, repetitive, uninteresting and plain boring. The initial concept seemed interesting at first but took a steep downhill, which it did not recover from. It took a lot not to shut it off after the first 30 min. I persisted and now wish I hadn't. It is not often a movie can annoy me like this movie did, as I could feel myself get agitated more and more throughout. The Room and Birdemic are far better movies than this. The CGI was decent for the most part, but the AI annoyed me, her voice was so low in volume you could barely hear her, and I believe it was done on purpose, for a reason I can't fathom. This is literally the worst movie I have seen all 2016. Avoid like the plague!

This film has the best trailer I've seen in years, a good combination of lights, colors and funky music. Then as a British Horror enthusiast I was thrilled to see it was a British movie. The praise stops there. Three actors a mixture of talent, two good females one awful male actor, a warren of tunnels that are probably the same and the worst American accents ever. Everything was American, it was like it was pretending not to be a British movie, but it was. The story is very "damned" similar, but that's also where that ends. Unfortunately the story was just too awful, 45 minutes in I just couldn't go on, it was truly unbearable, boring and utterly tiresome. You could have slept through portions and not missed a thing. So sad it was so bad, it could have been so good.

'Stupid' sums it up. I won't even waste time trying to explain why. It simply is. It was one of those films that I keep watching just in the hope that it will improve. In this instance, it didn't. I'd sooner re-watch Mill of the Stone Women or the 4-D Man. Eighty-two wasted minutes of my life I'll never get back. Really struggling to find anything good to say about it. Who sets up a research facility like that? (Don't want to include spoilers here.) This was supposed to be built around augmented reality. Can't say I thought they'd done even a poor job of it. Stay away. Just stay away.

Jenny (Elizabeth Morris) is struggling with money and caring for her bedridden mother. She gets hired along with Tiggs (Kara Tointon) and Darby (Elliot James Langridge) as chaperons in an underground facility. She is surprised to learn the subjects are little children being trained in a learning program with augmented reality. Everybody has to wear special glasses to see. There is the AI named Arial (Jamie Bernadette) to assist the newcomers. There are no other adults around. The kids communicate through the virtual reality and remains silent except for Cassandra (Isabelle Allen) who befriends Jenny. The movie is mostly filmed in the first person POV through those augmented reality glasses. As long as there are two or more people in the scene, it can switch back and forth almost like a regular movie. It's not until Jenny is alone that the movie is forced to be a solo camera affair. The camera restrictions and the glasses on everybody do distant the audience from the acting. I don't think the acting is bad but it is constrained. On the other hand, there is an opening rant that screams cheesy B-movie. The over-the-top acting there needs to be cut. One of the problem is that these are kids with no real superpowers. Nobody picks up a weapon, or even a stick. It's obvious the augmented reality could be compromised by the kids from the beginning. This is literally a horror that could be solved by a simple flashlight. It would be more compelling to have the augmented reality forced on them like an injected microchip. I kept thinking they should take off those glasses and light up the situation through another means. There is also a twist that is obvious from the start. It's completely expected and I simply waited for it to happen. The only positive is that the augmented reality looks fine especially if you compare it to the spartan bunker setting.

This is a typical -- watch it twice -- movie. A nice B movie with some head scratching at the end. ----- SPOILER BEYOND THIS POINT ------ There are small hints all the way through the movie. The Augmented Reality is the key to Questions that pop up in the first run. Keep an close eye on messages showed on the interface (glasses) they are not as random as they appear. At the end you figure out, that the "adults" are the the rats inside the lab controlled by the children. Because all they wanna do is play with their pets :D

I thought this would have a lot of promise, I really did. But the whole thing did not make any sense from the beginning. Not one bit of story was tied to anything at all. Spoiler alert: Who are the people at the beginning of the movie, was it her father and invalid mother? Why have it in there if absolutely nothing is referenced during the movie, except for one dream scene? I had so much trouble trying to tie things together (which I couldn't) I stopped and figured that if I had come this far, perhaps the puzzle was solved at the end of the movie......It wasn't at all. In fact, there were more questions at the end that it was infuriating. Spoiler alert: Who was the man that was burnt alive? They didn't even try to figure that out. What was Cassandra referencing when she said "it's always been about you, Jenny"? WTF? This could have made a great story but they didn't bother. Just a horrible movie...horrible.

Now you could see this as shutting off the movie (which would mean, you are kind of mean or think I am) or you can read this as something that can happen during the movie. Don't worry it's not a spoiler, though you do realize that this is playing in augmented reality. You could "shut" things off by taking off the glasses that make this world happen. But the movie itself has some interesting aspects and some interesting relationships that are going on between the characters and their closed environment. It's a closed space kind of thing and a couple of characters having to deal with things happening. I don't have to point out that things will not work smoothly, you can guess that by yourself. The twist towards the end, you may not be able to guess that easily, but you also probably won't like it for trying to make something out of nothing ... or is it giving it new life after all?

Honestly, I didn't think a movie could be worse than Superfast, but this one takes the prize. A true 10/10 for pure cinematic excrement. It is Crit1kal that you make time to check this one out. Two ambidextrous thumbs up.

Somehow the makers of this film managed to get seventy six point three per cent of the voters to give this piece of crap a rating of ten. The Internet Movie Data Base's rating system must be deeply flawed for a movie like this to get anything higher than a two. It started off like it might be a decent flick, but after fifteen minutes you realized it had terrible acting, plot, dialogue, music, direction and writing, and you thank God that you had something better to do with your time than follow a camera flying down corridors, air shafts and whatever else, than watch this poorly made and conceived movie. Until I got Netflix, I didn't realize that the UK could make even worse movies than they make in the US.