Movie Review: Dead Mary

A weekend trip to a remote cabin for a group of twenty-something couples turns into a fight for survival and who-can-you-trust after a drunken game of the urban legend "Dead Mary" summons something evil.

Sometimes I think these horror writers all think man's greatest fear is to be out of cell phone range, because once again our victims all stare at their phones repeatedly and say "I can't get service!!". Seriously though, how many cliches can you fit into one horror movie? You've got the old "bloody Mary" urban legend, where if you look in the mirror and say her name 3 times you'll summon her. You've got the isolated cabin. You've got everybody turning on everybody. But most importantly, you have the stupid ending that's not really an ending.

It takes way too long to get to all of this of course. The first 40 minutes or so play out like The Big Chill, with all these people meeting at the cabin and we get to learn all about their love lifes and drama. Booooring. When the horror finally starts, it's not very gory nor suspensful and really makes little sense. They never really define much about the back story of Dead Mary herself and they also never really explain how her "powers" work. It's all very illogical. They keep asking what happened to Ted and why hasn't he arrived, but they never even tell you. And again, the ending is just awful.

Anything good to say? Eh, well, the acting was pretty decent for a small budget film I thought. Dominique Swain is cute and Christina Colburn is pretty sexy.

So what you get out of this is a bunch of what you've seen before, many times, done much better. For an "unrated" movie as it was advertised also, there is little gore, no nudity or even bad language... but they do smoke pot. I'm guessing it's labeled as such only because it wasn't run by the MPAA and not because it's harder than an "R" rating, because it's basically PG-13.

Think of a boring version Urban Legend meets The Evil Dead, which this film seems so bad to want to be. Problem is, it's not even in the same woods as that classic.

3/10