The Haunting of Helena (2013)

Simply Perfect

A Masterpiece!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The first half of the movie, involving the mother and her daughter moving into an old apartment with a spooky past, is good. Creepy and suspenseful. The idea of the tooth fairy, and plot of the story is a good one. The special effects are very good, and the gore is minor, which I actually like. The scene where you finally see the "tooth fairy" is really good, scary and well directed. Then however, the movie takes a turn for the worse. It is slow moving and boring to some degree. The whole storyline within the mental hospital is disconnected to the first half of the story. It loosely ties into the history of the apartment, but kind of goes off the rails from there. It is unpredictable which is refreshing, the ending was not what I expected. The mother is the only person in the movie that you have any real connection with. The daughter is unpleasing, and a bit scary looking to begin with. I think I would recommend this if you like spooky movies that are not run of the mill, and low on gore. Good story, just kind of seemed like to parts that didn't tie in well together.

Don't you just hate it when a film doesn't live up to even a minor 10% of its own great potential? "Fairytale" easily could have been an old-fashioned sinister and atmospheric fable, but due to a variety of reasons (most of them relating to lack of talent) it turned out to be yet another sore disappointment. The film premiered at the annual Brussels Festival of Fantastic Films, and what mainly lured to me to theater was the plot synopsis mentioning the tooth fairy. Personally, I think there's great macabre potential in this theme, but so far this hasn't resulted in any good or even half-decent movies. There's an adequate episode of "Supernatural" devoted to the theme, but the only long-feature horror movie I recall is the mediocre "Darkness Falls". Like that one, "Fairytale" starts off promising but doesn't manage to retain the viewer's attention through lousy character development and inept usage of the splendid set pieces and filming locations. Harriet MacMasters-Green, who's a stunningly beautiful lady but a very implausible concerned single mother, moves into an ancient apartment building with her daughter Helena after her husband left them. The jerk went off to Hawaii for a life of partying and flirting with young gals, in fact. Naturally, the new house comes with an eerie and secretive old wardrobe and a nasty neighbor who claims they shouldn't have come here. After the single worst car crash ever staged on film, which leaves both mother and daughter miraculously unharmed, the house slowly unfolds its mysteries. Helena becomes disturbingly obsessed with the tooth fairy, who actually lived in the building and left her marks inside the wardrobe, but is she really a good spirit … or a restless and tormented soul roaming around? The entire film, or at least the first 75 minutes or so, drags endlessly and everything (acting, direction, coherence …) gradually gets worse. It's almost like a toothache that gets more painful because of infection and lack of care. The denouement brings some improvement, even though the twist ending is still somewhat derivative and predictable. Tales about mythical night creatures and fairies gone ballistic shouldn't be boring. Especially not if they are made in Italy. Whatever happened to this country's awesome horror reputation? And now that we're on the subject, why does everyone speak lousy English instead of plain normal Italian? They read their newspaper articles in Italian, so why don't they speak it?

This film is not all bad as some of the reviewers have stated. Some of the scenes were pretty good like the car crash and when it started to rain teeth. The story itself was good but there were too few scares and the story plodded along without really wowing you at any stage. The killings didn't really make sense and were all done off screen. I would've loved to have seen a vengeful ghost pull off someones jaw or even a good old decapitation. Alas this film fails to deliver in the scares department and doesn't play on your mind after the final credits like say Sinister does.The ending was tame. I was expecting something like that at the end but it was muddled. What did the mother see that drove her mad? Did she see the dead body of her daughter or was it her daughter doing the killings? Had the woman's ghost possessed the girl or was it just the Earthbound spirit of the girl walking around. What did the zombie makeup on the girl's face mean? Was it significant that the mother saw this on her daughter's face earlier in the film.

"Fairytale" was somewhat of a semi-disappointing experience, especially because the synopsis of the movie seemed interesting and the movie's poster was appealing. However, the movie just didn't deliver a well-placed punch that carried any weight. The movie was neither scary nor thrilling, but it did have the occasional moment here and there that was good enough.The story in "Fairytale" is about a mother living with her daughter, and they have just recently moved into a new home. However something very tragic have taken place in the very same home in the past, and the innocent believes of the daughter in the tooth fairy has awoken the spirit of the past, and the spirit is far from friendly.Sure, the storyline was good enough, although it didn't really carry anything much to offer the genre. It was basically all something that had been seen before. However, the two things that appealed to me in the movie was the car accident scene, as it was really nicely constructed, and the twist of events with the psychiatric hospital - which leaves you with something to think about.Effects-wise, then "Fairytale" was fairly tame, as it didn't really made any use of neither CGI nor special effects. It could be discussed whether or not this was a good thing, but personally I would have liked to have seen more usage of today's technology.And as for the acting, well it was fairly all-round adequate, except for Harriet MacMasters-Green who came off as rather unenthusiastic and lacking motivation in her role.