Cult (2007)

I'll tell you why so serious

From my favorite movies..

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Several college students researching an extinct local religious cult for a class project discover a powerful magical jade amulet of ancient Chinese origin. The amulet unleashes a potent supernatural force that threatens to destroy them all. Sound good? Well, it just ain't. For starters, director Joe Knee crucially fails to develop any necessary tension or creepy atmosphere. Moreover, Knee falls back on annoying cheap jump-out at-you fake scare tactics, uses an extremely irritating hyper-kinetic editing style, stages the murder set pieces in a clumsy manner (to be fair, there's a bravura mass sacrifice at the very start, but that's about it), and pumps up the furiously frantic pace to the point where it proves to be more wearying than thrilling. Benjamin Oren's talky and tedious cliché-ridden script likewise falters severely with a jumbled story that never jells into a coherent, compelling, and satisfying whole. The lousy CGI effects, grotty gore, blaring soundtrack, and cruddy tin-eared dialogue don't help matters any. The acting is strictly hit or miss: Both Racher Miner and Taryn Manning make an admirably game go of it, but are fighting a futile uphill battle the whole way; Fiona Horne contributes a respectable turn as a concerned college professor, Joel Michaely seriously grates on the nerves as obnoxious goofball Alex, and Rob Berson makes for an underwhelming villain as nefarious cult leader Owen Quinlan. David McFarland's foul cinematography makes vertigo-inducing use of a shaky prowling camera and gives the movie an ugly washed-out look. Thanh Tran's robust ominous score should have been saved for a much better film. A real stinker.

While studying the differences between religion and cult in college, Mindy (Rachel Miner), who is the best student in the class, convinces her schoolmates Cassandra (Taryn Manning), Bailey (Glenn Dunk), Alex (Joel Michaely) and Morgan (Victoria Venegas) to research the massacre of worshipers of Kwan Yin by their leader Owen Quinlin (Robert Berson) twenty years ago in California. Quinlin had found an ancient amulet in Southern China that would give an enormous power to him after the sacrifice of human souls, but one woman resists and he is destroyed. However, after the death of Morgan, who apparently committed suicide, the students discover that Quinlin has returned and is chasing their souls with his amulet.The storyline of 'Cult" is not totally bad. Unfortunately, the screenplay, the direction, the acting, the lines, the camera, the CGI and the edition are awful. I was completely bored and tempted to use the FF button of the DVD, but I resisted and wasted 90 minutes of my life watching this never-ending crap on a Saturday night. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): "O Amuleto Secreto" ("The Secret Charm")

This film is a nightmare! The sensation you feel when you wake up from a nightmare is the same I got when I finished watching this movie: "Uff…OK, it ended, what a relief!" I felt pain watching this movie, so bad it was! It's a B-series low cost movie, that's for sure, but I think it not an excuse to be so bad! I've watched brilliant low cost movies, with nice plots, nice production, nice acting, and most of all, some substance! This one got nothing of it! The plot is hilarious, it almost seems like an "American guide about how to transform ancient Chinese mythology into a ridiculous teenage movie, with some kids playing with the occult"… I don't know if the Chinese tale present in this movie is real or not, but if it is, the "damage" is even worse! The production is just horrible, a plain zero (What "special effects" are those?). There's no suspense. The supposed "tension scenes" are a complete failure. The acting is not better; and what about the dialogs? Oh my God! A movie which has for several times dialogs just like: "I will pass there later, OK? Is that alright? – OK, alright. - OK? – OK, alright, bye then"… I'm sure it doesn't deserve more than a 1/10 score!Too bad to be true!

First things first: don't watch this movie if you're waiting for some extreme gore and scares. Reason: it fails in both of them. So, I watched this movie with some friends. We were like "Oh, 'Cult'... must have spells or something like that... lets rent it!". So we did, and two hours later, when the movie's credits started rolling, I said: "Who thought it was crap? I did".Seriously. The story itself if sort of OK, but the script ruins it completely. The picture itself is too dark and you might have some trouble at finding out what happened in certain parts of the movie. So, the story is about a group of teenagers (cliché...) who is working on an essay for University, and they decide to write it about a cult. Thing is, this cult has connections with the main character, Mindy, and the movie is all about these connections between characters (with some deaths and blood in the middle). Image-wise, as I said before, the picture is very dark in some scenes, and in others, the camera just doesn't stop moving. OK, this works well with some movies, but in this case, it doesn't. It even makes the movie look even crappier. Adding that to fake CGI effects... As for acting... could be better. Most of the actors don't show much experience in front of the cameras, which leads their roles to "clichéness", typical in these horror movies. The villain himself is as cliché as the "hero survives in the end", which happens in all movies.Some scenes were made to scare you. Needless to say, they fail. The sounds used are banal and common, which makes these scenes the typical "scare time" of horror movies. I actually could tell when something was going to happen. Predictability.So, overall, this movie could be much better, if the script didn't turn the story into crap, and if the actors, CGI and sound weren't so commonly used and banal.Rating: 5/10