The Accursed

In the opening scene a witch (Meg Foster) who we later discover is Ms Ambrose is tricked into cursing herself with a demon by Mary Lynn (Alexis Knapp) who has a grudge about her husband with the witch. The demon manifests itself with the hand coming out of the mouth, hence the DVD cover. The film jumps to 3 months later. Eleanor (Sarah Grey) is s nurse who does volunteer work. She has returned home following the death of her mother. She is haunted by her mother while she stays in her house. She is offered a chance for a job as a nurse taking care of Ms. Ambrose by the creepy Alma (Mena Suvari). The house is remote as her friend Beth (Sarah Dumont) drives her there. Elly has flashbacks to her youth and still feels like she is in a haunted house. The ending wasn't that great tying together the plot. I thought the creep factor was good, especially just using simply audio effects. Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.

The first 15-20 minutes are semi-promising (despite Foster hamming it up as a witch), especially for a low-budget cheapie such as this. But then the inevitable happens and this crap starts rapidly deteriorating. First by the plot slowing down to a crawl almost, for quite a while, and then by it becoming rather idiotic in the last 20 minutes. This especially goes for that "musical number" which is one of the sillier end-twists I'd come across in recent years. A scene that belongs in "Scary Movie". Suvari must be desperate for roles... I didn't know that when a person gets a bottle smashed against their head, they immediately get up. Invincible villains has always been one of my biggest pet-peeves from the numerous film cliches. You wanna make the antagonist impervious to pain and injury? Fine, but first give them supernatural powers. Humans need to behave and react like humans, frcrissakes. Chaos reigns during the last third, both in terms of plot and direction. The whole things becomes strangely disjointed, with characters saying dumb things and behaving not quite logically. The dialog is clunky, the soundtrack weak, the tempo lame, the editing seems to be mishandled by someone not quite up to the task. The make-up is rubbish. What a load of boring, dumb crap.

This movie starts out pretty strong and grabs your attention from the first few minutes! It's pretty spooky at times and gets your adrenaline pumping. The story hasn't been done before as another reviewer suggested. It's certainly not a new genre but it does have an original story that keeps you entertained. It was fun to watch and I think the acting was fairly good. The main character was likable and the friend wasn't one of those annoying side characters you see so much of in other movies that you hope get killed off.. she was actually likable as well. The movie could have been a bit longer to build more substance but other than that it was a good spooky movie.

THE ACCURSED, not to be confused with the identically named movie from 2021, tells the story of a young nurse who takes on a short-term job caring for a quasi-comatose old lady in a house out in nowhere, basically as a means of distracting herself from the recent suicide of her mother. Little does she know that she is being set up by demonic forces to give much more than her clinical services. The prologue features some atmospheric cinematography which suggests a dark fantasy setting of the past even though it is actually set in the present. It also foreshadows the main problem with this movie: we can predict what will happen from a mile away. This is a major issue when the aim for much of the movie is to build creepy tension. The story offers few innovations apart from the fact that all major characters are female. The acting varies, with the strongest performances coming from Meg Foster, Mena Suvari and Sarah Dumont. The visuals are nice but not enough to compensate for the lack of tension due to predictability. I was going to write this off as a mediocre horror film, but unfortunately the film takes a nosedive in the last 15 minutes or so because the details of the course of events and especially the behavior of the characters, though running as predicted, become increasingly implausible. That is, implausibility is stacked on top of predictability. Unmotivated details like the face mask merely remind us that such horror gimmicks have been executed far more effectively in previous movies (For example, see the similar scene in DEVIL'S REJECTS (2005)). Also, the impact of the climax is sabotaged by the fact that the cool horror idea with the demon hand coming out of the mouth was already shown in a couple of earlier scenes. In my opinion, it would have been more effective to save it up and also spend more time on showing the whole body transformation more slowly. At any rate, the movie ends with what is meant to be a bang but left me curiously unmoved. I suspect the reason is that the demon's motivations at that point were not clear to me. This was an uneven effort which fell short of its potential. A better script especially could have elevated this to a good horror film.

The Accursed is low budget so don't expect a great movie. Not that you can't have great low budget movies but this is just not one of them. It just shows it's low budget. Some creepy scenes were not bad though, with some nice CGI's considering the budget but there are more mediocre scenes than good ones. As for the acting well it fits the budget again. Some of the actors are just not good, others can definitely do better as they showed that before. The story is one we all saw before, certainly if you're into possession horror movies. So it's been done before and better, unfortunately... It is watchable though, just don't get your hopes too high.