The Reeds (2010)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

THE REEDS is another entirely predictable horror yarn, set somewhat incongruously in the Norfolk Broads (for anyone who's ever been to the broads, you'll know they look nothing like the desolate, atmospheric place shown in this film). The cast are a group of uninteresting youths who run afoul of a dark secret, and the viewer's patience will be tested early on by the sheer banality of it all.The problem with films like THE REEDS is that they copy rather than innovate. So pretty much everything that you see taking place on screen here has been done before, and better too. The lines of dialogue are dull and lack spirit, and the cast give strictly ordinary performances with none standing out. The only person I recognised was Geoff Bell (COMEDOWN), stuck in one of those creepy elder type roles. Elsewhere, the film offers some bloodshed, a lot of screaming, and plenty of stuff shot in the dark to disguise the low budget. It's not very interesting.

**Massive spoiler warning, because I'm about to lay some science down on y'all** I'm gonna get verbose in this, so for you tl;dr (too long, didn't read)folks out there, I'm going to start with this: are you a fan of classic horror films? This one is worth a shot. Not great, but eminently watchable for a lazy Sunday or a super drunk Saturday. That's all you need to know. The end.Still with me? I doubt it. But in case you are, I'm going to tell you why a horror snob such as myself actually found a lot to enjoy in this one.To begin with, the setup is incredibly stock. Six Londoner friends (and initially I was confused because I didn't remember Bill Pullman ever starring in a British film, but then I remembered that he was actually in the other movie I was considering watching and not this one), evenly divided between three girls and three guys: two couples and an 'oooh are they going to be a couple?? teehee!' set out on a weekend getaway in the Norfolk Sounds. Yaaaaay swampy rivers and reeds and...well, who am I to judge. Booze makes everything better I guess.And then the buildup is incredibly stock. You have the spoooky harbinger who makes sure to mention that some lousy Gypo (I swear I'm not racist, that's the word he uses, oh god I'm so sorry)kids messed up the boat the couples were renting, so he has nothing for them. Except maybe this one boat way out at his other rental place in the middle of nowhere! *dun dun dun* And so on the common structure of such a movie unfolds. The asshole is an asshole, the long-suffering girlfriend is long-suffering, the virgin couple with chemistry is...chemistry...ish. Strange things start to happen. Visions without clear meaning, spooky sounds and then people start dying. In gory, messy ways. The asshole is first. Spoilers.And don't get me wrong. There's something a little tired about most of these deaths for a horror buff, but bear with me. A mystery starts unfolding and honestly, if you're still reading, you've seen this mystery before. I've seen it at least six or seven times. It's not all that hard to figure out. So, why did I like it? Let me bring you back. Every trope we have in writing, in drama, in poetry, in song, comes from somewhere. And there is a reason they were influential in their times. Everything from the 17th century Germanic Romantic hero to Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces were influential not just because their ideas were sound, but also because their ideas resonated with their audiences.Need it laid out? A lot of the horror tropes of our time: haunted pasts, sins of the father, vengeful ghosts, hell, even jump scares, came about because they had impact. What this film does, low budget and dime-a-dozen as it may seem, is take those tropes and use them effectively. It might not make them new again, but honestly it does them so well that I didn't care that they weren't new. And for B grade horror...that's pretty impressive.I've seen this story a million times, but I was still interested...if not precisely on the edge of my seat. This movie takes some old and tired tropes and makes them work, almost like they were still at the apex of their inspiration. Maybe I'm reading too much into it and you'll have an entirely different experience from me, but I honestly believe this film deserves a see from people who love the genre. You won't see anything new, but you may see something worth seeing in something considered 'old hat'.Oh. One more thing. You goobers who found the ending too 'ambiguous'...the flash of black over a living character's eyes represents the force of Gnosis. Duh.

I'd say this film is more of a puzzling suspense film than a horror flick. It's a rather intelligently-written film, but it still didn't completely wow me. Again, the typical handful of young adults, this time in the setting of taking a boat through some reedy marsh-like area of the UK. For a long time, the entire movie feels like a jigsaw puzzle. We're shown glimpses of the whole, but we still can only guess what they all fit together to finally mean.Is it a basic madman slasher thing? Are they being haunted by ghosts? Dopplegangers? Ah, it's some weird temporal flux thing...but still, that only explains a piece of the overall mystery. Who's the guy in the hood with the gun? What's his beef exactly? This movie will do a good job for a lot of people to unsettle them because the audience keeps having to ask these questions. And as we're calmly asking questions, our main protagonists are panicking here and there at what they don't understand. So much of the suffering and death comes from this really wonderful plot device: when you experience something you don't understand, the worse part of you wants to panic. When you panic, you're prone to make bad decisions. When you make bad decisions, bad things happen and people get hurt. The fact that so many of our main characters just screwed themselves over because of this speaks to me of relatively smarter storywriting.However, this film isn't without its flaws. I said a lot of people would be unsettled by the nature of this film's storyline, but not me. Again, it felt more like a mystery movie than a horror flick, and the climax, while it still puts together enough of the pieces to satisfy us, didn't leave me feeling like much was really resolved. There's no real denouement, especially as we are led to believe with the final scene that the couple who "escaped" get caught back at the beginning of the entire temporal loop that messed them all up in the first place. Give a try, though; you might enjoy it.

Reeds is scary as like playing hide and seek in a house. Sorry, actually playing hide and seek would be a bit scarier. Reeds tries to copy Triangle, and fails (mind you, triangle is a fail on its own turf...ocean). Nothing new here, actors are dumb and almost retarded in reactions. Occasionally the film will try to scare you, miserably, and you'll grab your head saying:"I wanna fast forward this..." Actors look like they were chosen at a Supermarket, and not an audition. But the story...leaves viewer in a question: "What the hell was this all about"? The humble director and his minions explain in a 10 minutes segment on the very end what's the purpose of this...not impressed, highly crossed in fact. Do yourself a favor, don't watch it, there are better movies than this garbage!