58 - The Invoking

    Four friends travel to an isolated country property to look at some property that one of them has inherited.
    This is a rare movie for me.  It’s not good.  But I’m hesitant to call it bad.
    It’s got some decent production values.  The photography is generally good, even in some low-light situations.  The bright daytime shots are very nice.  The sound is good.  Usually sound is one of the first areas to suffer when a project is lower budget.  (This can’t be right - IMDB says that it was made for $11,000.
    The effects work is minimal.  Very, very minimal.  The editing is usually fine, but during faster-paced sequences, it’s not quite right.
    There are two points where the movie fell short.  First, the casting.  The dress and actions of the cast suggests that these people are probably college age.  But that conflicts with their appearance.  There were some points where cast members looked much older than I expected them to.
    The other point is that the script wasn’t right.  I don’t like criticizing scripts.  I usually like to speculate about the ways that the story might be adjusted to work better.  In this case, it’s a rare instance where the main idea of the story was pretty good, but the way that idea was supported is all wrong.
    The movie is 82 minutes long, per IMDB.  The first hour of the movie is conversation, wandering around, some character development, and setting up stuff.  Then, at roughly the 1-hour mark, something important happens.  I actually checked to see how long it took to get to this event.
    This event should have been, if not a starting point, at least happened at the 45-minute mark.  Ideally, the sooner to the beginning this event happened, the better the movie would have felt.
    As a result of this, the last 20 minutes of the movie are all that matters.  I won’t remember anything about the first hour of this movie.
    The dryness of the first hour is accentuated by the minimal use of music.  When there was music, I actually liked it a fair amount.  It was minimalist, but it was evocative.  Perfectly fine.  But there are long stretches of slow conversation with no music.  No taut editing to make these sequences interesting.
    Again, I reiterate that I didn’t hate this.  I’m impressed with the work they did with such a tiny budget.  But some more workshopping of the script might have made a big difference.