Adam Mahler (adammahler1)

Like two movies strangely fused together. The first is the better one, although Carol Kane has a strange accent and seems kind of distant for a teenager. It would be a great short film on its own (and the camerawork of the remake is much dumber).

The second part of the composite movie is more of a 70s thriller-drama, which humanizes the unseen killer from the first part and asks whether being treated like a monster will make him kill again or is it just inevitable. The actor Tony Beckley makes this an interesting question. The director does a 180 degree on his horror movie and sees things from the monster's POV as he tries NOT to kill. Has this been done before?

Beckley gives a great performance; still, it's hard to believe that he is the same bogeyman-like creature from the opening segment. Along the way, the movie forgets some things, like plot logistics, but remembers what's scary about nightmares intruding on real life.

This movie had a hack script that should not have been filmed. I haven't seen the original, but sometimes when producers think they have name-recognition in the source material, they overlook badness that what would be obvious to any writer-director who had less to spend and *had* to rely on as good a script as possible.

This guy wrote with no sense of humility toward the horror film, more a mind to how a PG-13, mostly female audience might swallow some crap with high production values and a heroine they could identify with ("She's a babysitter, it's perfect! We'll put her in the drama of teen romance and a cell phone bill that gets the phone taken away!") The producer and screenwriter think the whole genre, or thriller sub-genre, is all about timing false scares and real scares and when to reveal the villain. They somehow thought unceasing lighting effects from the elaborate set would supersede care with the camera.