The B-Movie Shelf

In a small town in Massachusetts, a group of friends, fascinated by the internet lore of the Slender Man, attempt to prove that he doesn't actually exist - until one of them mysteriously goes missing. REVIEW: I have to admit that for the first 20 minutes or so of Slender Man, I was honestly really digging it. It was shot great with some really nice visual shots, it had an amazing sense of atmosphere, and the characters (at this point) were all likeable. But then the rest of the movie happened and every single bit of that went out the window. The acting got abysmal, as if the actors were reading off cue cards just off the screen, nobody at all was likeable and it seemed like the scriptwriter went out of his way to make these characters as unlikable as possible, the dialogue they had to work with didn't even make sense half the time, and all of the interesting visual shots and atmosphere seemed to be left behind and exchanged for cheap laughable...

Ben and Ashley, brother and sister, reunite 20 years after the murder of their parents to face the cause of their parents' death, a supernatural creature known as The Rake REVIEW: The acting is atrocious in The Rake, very very amateurish, and even though it has a really awesome, genuinely creepy opening scene, after that it takes forever for anything of note to really happen, and we have to spend that time with all these uninteresting, unlikable, badly-acted throw away characters. However, once you tough it out through all that, the last 30 minutes is actually pretty great. It's creepy as hell, far more gory than I expected, and a really awesome creature, plus all of that - from the creature itself to the high level of gore - is all done with practical effects that really work well and look fantastic. It's just a shame that most everything leading up to that stuff is a real hard slog to get through. 5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward