Solstice

Okay, Five Teenagers Go To A Spooky Old House In The Woods And...
....everything you'd expect doesn't happen. Following a setup delightfully lifted from every slasher film, five students head off to celebrate "Senior Week" at a spooky old house in the Louisiana woods. En route to the place, the happy kids pass a creepy-looking old man standing alongside the road....

....and they get to their destination safely, where they promptly begin to do all of the things kids in slasher films do. They get drunk, go swimming, sit up late by firelight, and two of them sneak off to have sex. But when morning comes....everyone is still alive! However, some decidedly odd things have begun to happen.

While the film gradually builds its storyline out of elements both real and possibly supernatural (or are they figments of the imagination?), director Dan Myrick ("The Blair Witch Project") skillfully aims his camera into the story, wisely including a few scenes which viewers must surely be expecting (there is a "shower scene", a sequence of...

A sneaksihly good movie
I am drawn to a dvd that has a cover like Solstice does. Reminds me of all the 'wanna be' movies that came out after 'Scream' and I guess even 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'. I usually expect them to be bad, with maybe a decent moment that might...MIGHT...make me jump or feel uneasy or look up at my second floor balcony that peers into the living room where shadows look like ghosts in the dark.

With this movie though, I watched it with a big group of friends since I was at work and nothing much was going on (and I'm in Iraq so its not like I get to go home to watch it on my TV..heh). The whole group I was with was pretty much into the movie. Of course watching a movie like this will have a bunch of guys, when together, blurting out to the TV for someone to 'just take your top off already' or 'man this movie would be a lot cooler if she'd take her top off'. Guy talk. But after about 20-30 minutes of that, most of everyone was sitting still and getting into the movie...

A surprisingly good mystery.
I am always on the hunt for a good thriller/mystery that I can watch with my whole family and I discovered this one over the weekend.

My headline says "a surprisingly good mystery" because I have to admit that any thriller centered around teenagers or young adults (20 something) is often, in my view, very lame due to overacting by half-dressed stereotypical teenagers, a cliched-ridden script, a "been there, done that" formula plot, and blood and sex thrown in just for the sake of having them there as if that compensates for all negatives. This film is nothing that you would expect, thankfully.

It is important to note that there is nothing original here other than it combines different genres cleverly and gives you the opposite what you think you might get. This, of course, is all good even though it does copy ideas and moments from better films. Based upon the box description and general early feel of the film, I thought this film would be something like a...

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