| Overall Grade: |
D |
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| Story: |
D |
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| Acting: |
C |
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| Direction: |
D+ |
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| Visuals: |
D+ |
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About as Scary as a Grapefruit
by Michael M (movies profile)
Jun 14, 2008
2
of
2 people found this review helpful
If you think "Joshua" is a horror movie, I suggest you always carry a spare pair of trousers with you in case you accidentally look down and see your own shadow. This movie (hilariously discribed as "Hitchcockian") has no idea what it wants to do--except be scary, which director/writer George Ratliff and co-writer David Gilbert pursue with all the fumbling gusto of screaming teenage fans waiting in line for a pop concert.
The story--what little there is--centers around the parents of Joshua, a supposedly brilliant nine-year-old devil-child, and how everything basically goes to hell once Joshua's baby sister is born. OK, stop. Let's take this one step at a time.
How do we know that Joshua is brilliant? Um... because he talks about what he learned in school and wears his shirts buttoned all the way up to the top.
How do we know he's evil? Well, because he looks hard at things and doesn't blink.
But more importantly, WHY is he evil? In other words, why is he trying to drive his poor parents nuts? Well... the filmmakers would like us to believe that it's because he's jealous of the attention his baby sister gets.
One problem: his parets are clearly making a strong effort to shower him with attention, affection, and encouragemet, so the emotional catalyst just is't there. Nor do we have any real clue as to whether Joshua is inherently sadistic, or just acting out of desperation.
Likewise, the various "twists" aren't really twists at all, since this movie ends pretty much exactly the way you thinnk it would--but, oddly, in a much less plausible way.
About three-fourths of the way through this stumbling, seemingly made-for-TV film, the filmmakers try to trick us by implying that someone/something else is the villain--as though the audience were just that stupid! But they take this too far, meaning the villain COULDN'T be the villain after all! In other words, the filmmakers contradict themselves.
Spoiler warning: there's no way Joshua could be at fault for everything that happened, since it's never addressed if/how he could have tampered with his mom's medication (what, does he have a secret chemistry lab somewhere that he also uses to poison animals?), nor is it addressed what he was doing to make his sister cry all the time. If he was just wandering into her room all the time and shaking her awake, wouldn't the parents eventually catch him? Why would she keep crying in the afternoons? And come to think of it, what parents keep their crying newborn in a separate room down the hall?
This movie also asks us to make some huge leaps of faith, like: 1) no one else saw Joshua push a certain character down the stairs of a crowded public place and kill her... in the middle of the afternoon! 2) that the father, upon discovering a very disturbing home movie filmed by his son, showed it to... absolutely no one! 3) that child psychologists see a child scribble a scary picture and IMMEDIATELY conclude that a child has definitely been abused (hey, I drew scary pictures, too; I just thought they were cool!), and finally, 4) that a nine-year-old boy sitting at a piano and singing a godawful adult contemporary song is scary... well, actually, that IS pretty horrifying! |
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