Also rented the horror movie The Disappointments Room, a flick I assure you was released theatrically a few months ago. This is a very odd and pretty bad movie about a vaguely haunted house where nothings much happens, even for a vaguely haunted house movie. It’s so low energy and unfocused that even its genre cliches are kind of lazy… there aren’t many jump scares, there’s a few too many dream/did-that-really-happen sequences but they don’t really have much of a point because the movie is so aimless.
Anyhow, an architect played by Kate Beckinsale, her husband with about three different accents, and their kid who can’t act move into an impossibly large southern manor for reasons undetermined. They eventually get around to finding a hidden room not on the floor plans (but with an attic window that’s hard to miss)… this is the Disappointments Room, a room where rich folk used to hide their embarrassing (usually deformed or mentally challenged) children from the public.
And we slowly – very slowly – learn Bad Things happened in that room… and bad things happened to our lead character in her past. Beckinsale walks through the movie and we learn that she’s got the hysteria because, I guess, she’s a woman and despite her ability to get an architecture degree, she’s still unstable. So there’s a vague, non-zero chance that nothing that slowly happens int his movie ever really happens. Because she’s got the vapors. Or something.
This is a kind of amazing movie if, by amazing, I mean perplexing, aimless, and pointless. It’s actually filmed pretty well… but something went very wrong at the script level. And then it ended and I was left not bored but also not scared, chilled, or pretty much even interested. Kind of like the characters in the movie.
Score: 70