20140216: Horror Review--The Telling

The Telling

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. American live action feature length film, 2009, rated R, 83 minutes, horror.
2. IMDB: 3.7/10.0 from 1,305 audience ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No score yet,' and 17% liked it from 257 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 2.6/5.0 from 45,053 audience ratings.
5. Directed by: Nicholas Carpenter.
6. Starring: Holly Madison as Stephanie, Bridget Marquardt as Eve DeMarco, Christina Rosenberg as Amber, Nicole Zeoli as Roxy, John D'Aquino as Viktor.


2. Setup and Plot
1. There is a bit of a grisly segment where a sorority girl is killed.  We flash forward one year to an induction sequence at the same sorority.  Three pledges get the challenge to tell the scariest story that they know.  So the film anthology has its overarching context ("Sorority Sisters").


2. Story 1 (Dollface): A man and his girlfriend have a woman house guest for a couple of weeks.  The man finds an antique doll in a dumpster.  The doll is possessed, supposedly, and engineers the deaths of the two women, and manages to get the man blamed for it.


3. Story 2 (Crimson Echo): A fading star gets fewer and fewer parts until she gets none when she's over thirty.  Out of the blue, she gets a gig in Europe.  She's desperate enough to take it.  She's drugged and prepped.  Then she meets her crew, who are all undead.  What becomes of her?


4. Story 3 (Prank Call): Three young women go out to catch a horror fest, but did not get tickets first.  They return home with the hope that the cable guy is done.  They get into telephone pranks; things go downhill from there.


5. After the three stories are finished, the sorority rejects all three of the pledges.  One of the pledges is the sister of the girl in the first sequence.  Guess what happens next.


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Bad on acting, screenplay, music; strong on cleavage.
2. One star of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 7/10 Reasonably good.


2. Sound: 5/10 Also reasonably good.  Some of the incidental music was rather enjoyable, but I could not figure out what it had to do with the film.


3. Acting: 0/10 John D'Aquino was the only one I recognized as an actor.  The rest were uniformly terrible.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 Oi, as bad as the acting.  Well, perhaps worse: nothing new, nothing scary, nothing remotely believable.