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Wes Craven Presents They

Wes Craven Presents They

List Price: $19.99
Your Price: $17.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: I agree, the alternate ending would have helped
Review: It's hard to say to what degree it might have helped the overall film, but the alternate ending was the better of the two. As the theatrical version stands, it's a below average horror flick with a poor ending.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: It's a popper
Review: Okay, so this movie has a pretty typical plot with the monsters coming to get the only people who know about them and of course no one believes them and whatever. But scary movies usually aren't exactly plot driven and in my opinion this movie was scary. It's incredibly suspenseful because you know something bad is going to happen and it does but not exactly how you'll think it will. And EVERYTHING pops out. Seriously. My friends were jumping so many times and you don't like that kind, don't get this one. All in all, in a year of seriously below average scary movies (Darkness Falls, Final Destination 2) this is definitely ok.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It wasn`t that bad!
Review: This movie is about three friends and they all have night terrors.After there other friend kills him self [he also had night terrors] they start haveing REAL night terrors that they hadn`t had for years.Now they are try to survie from the creepy creatures that will do anything to EAT them!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: I kinda wish I hadn't bought this one.
Review: It's not exactly the worst movie you'll see, but there's just nothing to it. The characters are flat, 2-D, caught up in the less-than-epic windsweep of a movie that seems half finished. It involves this girl who gets called to a coffee shop by her flake childhood friend. The guy's freaking out because of these little monsters that are coming to get him. He shoots himself in the head, and then the monsters go after the girl. Evidently, these stick-thin malignant little critters hang around in the dark, marking children in their beds at night and then showing up to harvest them like twenty years later. There just wasn't much point to the whole thing.

Now the monsters are trying to get the girl, and no one believes her, except for this couple she finds that suffer from the same problem. The monsters get the two of them, dragging them away to their pointless dark world of skinny monsters to a fate unknown. The girl explains how the monsters mark their prey---by putting these six-inch bird claws somewhere in their body. Just stupid. Anyway, the movies follows along through this uneventful chase where the monsters keep trying to get the girl. In the end, she winds up in the mental hospital, where the monsters drag her into the closet, which is evidently a gateway to their world. That's it. I just really don't see where this movie needed to be made at all. I've seen plenty worse, but very few as disinterested and uninspired. That old movie, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark, I think it was called, was better than this. There were those vaguely phallic slimy little monsters in mohair coats taunting and eventually kidnapping that chick. Those monsters seemed more motivated, and were much campier and cooler in the beloved Night Stalker sort of way. I liked that movie much better.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: They Stink
Review: For years Wes Craven has run a close second to Paulie Shore in the "Box Office Poison" catagory. However, with the release of the idiotic and narcoleptic "They", I feel that Craven has just vaulted into the lead. An anorexic Laura Regan "stars" (for lack of a better word) as a psychology grad student, which is actually harder to swallow than believing that she and a small group of 20-somethings were being stalked by limber skelotonesque demons in the dark. I was stunned that a horror movie could be made without any horror in it. Kudos to director Robert Harmon for accomplishing that nifty feat. Otherwise, the premise, the acting and the lack of any semblance of continuity in plotting reaked of re-hash. Apparently, the producers of "They" lost the race to put out a Sleep-Demons-Attack-Kids movie before "Darkness Falls" was released. It's hard to imagine a more boring and film than "They" -- not counting "The Postman", of course. Sometimes I still wake up screaming for having wasted the $3.99 to rent this drivel. One Star for seeing Regan almost naked -- that's all I could muster.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: The Alternate Ending Is Better
Review: Wes Craven stuck his name on this film even though he didn't direct it. Sometimes I like Wes Craven films, sometimes I don't. This time I really didn't. I liked the opening scene when the boy is hiding under the covers from the monster coming out of the closet. It led me to believe I was going to watch a truly scary film. But once into the film, it was predictable, badly acted, and just plain typical. I have seen all of this before. Childhood friends reuniting in their adulthood and having one thing in common, being traumatized as a child by a spook. Don't go in the dark because there are monsters there, and the monsters can't come into the light. This idea was just used in DARKNESS FALLS. I even got up to get something to eat without pausing the DVD, I just let it play on. I did enjoy the alternate ending much better than the one that was used. I won't spoil what the alternate ending is, but it would have made this movie much more original had it been the real ending.
My opinion: Not memorable at all, not a film I will go back and watch again.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Oh, for God's sake....
Review: Turgid, pointless, illogical drivel, and I've only awarded this 'movie' one star becuase Amazon doesn't have a Zero star rating.

Laura Regan isn't a bad actress. Wes Craven isn't a bad director. So how two relatively talented people came together to churn out such a hopeless little exercise in mundanity and mystifyingly terrible special effects is beyond me. 'They' follows the adventures of the pedantic and hapless Julia (Regan) as she tries to ignore the ruination of her life by some deeply repressed childhood memories come back to haunt her.

All the cliches are present: Moody Arty Dude with near-ESP. He dies. Enigmatic, European-looking Beauty with a dark past. She dies. Handsome boyfriend who is unaffected by the goings-on. He doesn't die. Tension-building scene on a deserted road in the middle of the night. Surprise Shock Dream sequences. Blah Blah Blah.

Who the hell cares?

In this day and age are we really expected to be interested in such predictable, poorly-written tripe? It's almost insulting that any movie studio would release a film like this, much less an established studio like Buena Vista. What were they thinking? Avoid this movie like the plague, unless you're into boredom.

Oh, a note on the DVD extras - the alternative ending sequence is actually a far better ending than the one kept in the actual movie. It's still awful, but it's a slightly more bearable kind of awful.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: spiders in the dark
Review: this movie has a lot of bad acting in it, Laura Regan for example and Jon Abrahams and that Dagmara Daminjc(whatever the hell her name is). though Marc Blucas and Ethan Embry pick this movie up its too bad Embry bits the dust in this one and the plot is too, too predictable and your sitting rooting for the spiders to kill Regan's character, but the ending is a surprise

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Really bad
Review: The opening scene of this movie is all you need to see, it's too long and by the time SOMETHING (not sure what, but something I guess), happens, you don't even care. Aside from having absolutely NO story whatsoever, this movies sports some of the absolute worst dialogue and worst acting I've ever seen. Two minutes into this movie you could care less about anything or anyone.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Do you have the Mark?
Review: If you're thinking about giving "They" a look-see, I have one question for you: do you want something nasty, stylish, and chilling which is not about ghosties, not about ghoulies, but definitely about long-legged Beasties that go bump in the night?

Long-legged Beasties that hide underneath your bed and *really* want you, in the middle of the night, to go for a glass of water, so they can reach out a leathery, brittle-black hand and grab your ankle?

Long-legged Beasties that really *are* hiding in the closet?

If you answered "yes" to even one of these questions, then "They" is for you. But quick, let's talk about "They" director Robert Harmon, just for a minute.

Nearly two decades ago, director Robert Harmon helmed a shivery, beautifully filmed little shocker called "The Hitcher", in which Rutger Hauer freakishly brought to life the very image Jim Morrison must have had in mind when he penned "Riders on the Storm". "The Hitcher" worked in spades, was extra heavy on the red sauce, was very moody, and managed to give some heft to that age-old advice for the road traveler: don't pick up hitchhikers, especially crazy-eyed ones in wet trenchcoats who look just like Rutger Hauer.

I have waited nearly 17 years for a thrilling follow-up from Harmon that rivals the unmitigated terror of "The Hitcher", and, alas, I'm still waiting. But that said, Harmon's latest little effort "They" is a stylish little slice of ghoulish grue that creeps and crawls very nicely, thank you.

Sancta simplicitas! The plot to "They" is admirably clean and simple: a bunch of twenty-somethings are once again suffering the savage little night terrors they suffered as children, with one little hitch: the creatures in the darkness, They, took them from their beds and marked them, and now They want to take them into their own horrible midnight world.

Our cast of characters here starts out small and quickly gets smaller: Julia Lund, the fetching beanpole heroine (played to goose-pimply lithe perfection by Laura Regan, now my latest cinematic crush); her bumptious slacker boyfriend, Paul (the annoying, simpering Mark Blucas, who, sadly, doesn't die in "They"); her old friend Sam (a sketchy, twitchy role by Ethan Embry); and his friends, Terry (played by the breathtakingly yummy Dagamara Dominczyk, a Polish actress who played the role of Mercedes in "Count of Monte Cristo") and Billy.

Alas, Sam isn't long for this world. He tells his old friend Julia that he is marked, stalked by the Things that lived in his closet as a child, and he believes that They are coming back to take him. After a moody, paranoid, whispered conversation during a dreamily lit and creepy-crawly sequence in a diner, Sam kills himself, leaving Julia to puzzle through Sam's morbid fears, to meet his friends Terry and Billy (who themselves confess to having been marked and feel stalked), and, ultimately, to suspect that the things that terrified Sam have declared open season on her, as well.

"They" is not a perfect film: it's over too quickly, so you don't have time to really form any kind of bond with the pencil-thin characters here. And unlike the sanguine "The Hitcher", Harmon doesn't lay on the red sauce, and a little gore is always welcome in spooky proceedings of this sort. "They", as a result, is a little like spaghetti carbonara without the carbonara sauce.

But that said, "They" is a stylish little chiller: the set design, dreamy cinematography (particularly all those aerial and swooping shots, and especially the subway sequence)come together to create a mounting sense of impending, merciless doom. The scene with Regan standing before a bathroom mirror gave me the crawls. And given the identity of the movie's eponymous They, that's about right: the things that stalk our heroes do so in the shadows, in closets, under beds, in darkened subway tunnels, and they do so without an ounce of pity. And we see just enough of them to tease our imagination: they are leathery, blackened, sinuous horrors, calling to mind David Twohy's beasties in "Pitch Black."

"They" reminds me of a waking nightmare, and the scene in which Julia discovers what's buried beneath her own 'Mark' feels like something from a bad dream. Better still, there are no safety zones in "They": the heroes are constantly hunted. Add to that the stylish swimming pool and subway sequences, the lovely Regan and Dominczyk, and the creepy cinematography, and "They" is a perfect, moody little film for a crisp, dark October night---but you might want to take a look in all your closets first.


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