VeteranLight
I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
Matt Kracht
When I watched this movie, I was struck by how bland, boring, and predictable it was. It was never actually bad or anything, but it was arguably memorable for being so forgettable. It was only after I came to the IMDb that I discovered it was directed by one of the guys responsible for that utter borefest, The Blair Witch Project. At that moment, everything made sense to me, and I felt totally vindicated in my intense dislike for TBWP (which all my friends, at the time, seemed to think was pure genius). I also realized that this director had done The Believers, which was, unsurprisingly, a bit of a borefest, though the ending was kind of cool (even though it was stolen from a Arthur C. Clarke story). Unfortunately, this movie doesn't really have an interesting twist to save it, unless you're really, really unfamiliar with the last 50 years worth of ghost stories coming out of Hollywood.Eduardo Sanchez, the co-director of TBWP, made a pretty good movie a few years ago, called Altered, about a group of friends who have a really nasty series of run-ins with malevolent aliens. Unlike this one, I walked in to that movie thinking it was going to be crap, but I was quite surprised at how much I liked it. It was suspenseful, gory, and, while it wasn't really original, it still managed to put its own spin on a common theme (alien abduction). Really, it was more a movie about rape than anything else, couched in science fiction/horror elements. This movie? It's exactly what it looks like -- a group of stupid teenagers (played by 30 year old actors, of course), including a depressed girl, the depressed girl's best friend, an insensitive jerk, the insensitive jerk's long-suffering girlfriend, and the depressed girl's love interest (who also happens to be her dead twin sister's ex-boyfriend), spend about 70 minutes getting drunk, followed by about 15-20 minutes of plot, wherein they follow the psychic intuitions of the depressed girl, only to solve a Scooby Doo mystery. Unfortunately, this movie has all the thrills, mystery, and suspense of your average Scooby Doo episode, perhaps due to the PG rating. Amusingly, the ghosts ended up just standing around, in the background, looking as bored as I felt, while I was watching this movie.Prepare to be bored to death, rather than scared to death.
MBunge
This movie is what you get when you try to stretch a paragraphs' worth of plot and about two sentences' worth of characterization into a hour-and-a-half story. This ghostly tale is equal parts dumb and boring and the few cheap scares it musters up can't compete with a plethora of astoundingly contrived scenes and a near total lack of recognizable human behavior.6 months after her twin sister committed suicide, Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) and her 4 friends head out to a big house in the Louisiana swamps to celebrate the Summer Solstice before heading off to college in the fall. While she's there, Megan is tormented by frightening visions that revolve around a teddy bear key chain her sister always carried around. What looks like the girl from the well in The Ring movies also shows up a couple of times. After boinking her dead sister's ex-boyfriend and making goo goo eyes at a handsome local who knows a little cajun voodoo, Megan finally discovers the reason she's being haunted and how it's connected to a creepy redneck who lives across the lake.From teenagers putting on suits and ties to hold a dinner party to a huge house in the swamp that's perfectly maintained without a caretaker, from a plot twist that makes you want to throw something at the screen to one of Megan's friends looking like a preppie who escaped from a 1980s sex comedy (including wearing a polo shirt with an upturned collar), there's nothing about this film that makes sense or resembles anything like reality. These filmmakers took a very old and very clichéd ghost story that everyone's heard before and just started stapling stupid stuff onto it.There are 7 characters in the story, yet they don't even have one personality among them. The film throws a few dream sequences at the audience but never defines exactly when they begin. So when the dream sequences end, you're not sure what actually happened and what was the dream. There's a series of flashbacks to the night Megan's sister killed herself, but there's no connection between what's going on in the story and when we see the flashbacks. It's not like something happens that makes Megan or someone else remember that night. The flashbacks are just inserted into the film, like little bathroom breaks for the viewer. You certainly can take a whiz anytime a flashback happens, because none of them contribute anything to the story.If its cast of attractive young people had at least gotten naked a few times, Solstice might have been almost tolerable. If R. Lee Ermey had gone the full monty, it might have become horrifically irresistible. As it is, Solstice is just another PG-13 horror flick where the only horrifying thing about it is that I paid money to watch this piece of crap.
kevin_crighton
After the death of her twin sister Sophie, Megan heads of for a few days with her friends. However, on arrival at the family cottage, Megan begins to experience visions and dreams. Is her sister trying to reach out to her from the dead, or is it something else....?Directed by Daniel Myrick, who co-directed The Blair Witch Project, Solstice has many things going for it. The cast are pretty good, with special mention to Elisabeth Harnois, as Sophie/Megan. On screen pretty much the whole film, meaning the film stands or falls on her being convincing, and she is very good indeed.The setting does give the film a nice atmosphere, and the story has enough of a mystery about it to keep you interested until the end.But as a film that is supposed to be a horror film, Solstice fails. Yes the setting is atmospheric, but none of the so-called scare scenes work at all. Myrick, who has made scarier films, doesn't pull of the scares here at all. In fact, I think the film would have been better as a mystery-type film, dropping the horror elements completely.Despite this though, I did enjoy it, and while it will never be remembered as a classic or highly regarded, I was never bored at any point and found it to be an enjoyable film.
sddavis63
We have here another thriller in which a bunch of young people head out into the middle of nowhere and find themselves stuck in a "scary" situation. What I will say in favour of this movie is that at least it avoided the cliché of having some type of cannibalistic mass murderer out to get them (a cliché that was actually mentioned by one of the characters when they met up with the creepy old guy from the other side of the lake.) In this case, we have young Megan, still tormented by the suicide of her twin sister six months before, heading off with a bunch of her friends on their annual trip to celebrate the summer solstice in the Bayou of Louisiana. Why they do this wasn't entirely clear to me, except that Megan's mom is some sort of anthropologist or something who specializes in culture and so apparently they celebrate every holiday known to humanity (which is a pretty nice gig if you can get it!) Once they're in the Bayou, Megan starts to have visions which she thinks are of her sister, and she discovers in a magazine (quite conveniently) that the summer solstice is the perfect time to contact the dead. She also conveniently runs into a local hunk of a grocery store clerk who happens to know how to contact the dead because his grandmother was involved in voodoo. I'm not kidding.Now, as truly silly as that all seems, I have to say that, while it's full of mostly forgettable (although not bad) performances, this movie isn't terrible. There's a pretty decent buildup of the intrigue and suspense until the final secret which finally connects both Megan's visions and the creepy old guy is revealed, but you do have to get through a lot of pretty cliché type situations to get there. As a timewaster this isn't bad, but if you want a really good thriller, this is not going to satisfy at all. 5/10
