Dear Michael Goi,

In the hour you spent leading up to the scares and demonstrating that you’ve never spoken to or interacted with an actual teenage girl, your found-footage horror predecessor The Poughkeepsie Tapes built genuine unease and dread.

In the fifteen minutes you spent on one monotonous endless single-shot scene, your found-footage horror predecessor August Underground delivered realistic, shocking action.

I’m not going to bother reviewing the remaining five minutes of film where you attempt to do anything, because you’ve wasted too much of my time already.

Me: I don’t know, it’s a good concept and we’ve got some good imagery but this could really stand some tighter editing and more control over—

Jeffrey Dean Morgan: Hi I am putting on glasses

Me: Oh god I just forgave this movie so hard

…

Me: I don’t know, it’s really nice to see them tackling the exorcism rites of another culture but in that case, shouldn’t the movie have more Jewish characters, maybe delve into the—

Matisyahu: Hi I am acting in a horror movie

Me: Oh god I just forgave EVERYTHINGEVERYWHERE so hard

(Seriously though, for a movie about Jewish demons that was a whole lotta WASP action and making the family liberal Reform would have been not only a more inclusive and progressive move, but a way more interesting story.)

Science: you fail at it.

5 second cameo of J-Pad!

And, uhhhhh….that’s about it.

The good: Gorgeous to look at. Crisp cinematography, sweeping battle scenes, great scenery, absolutely incredible costuming. Really, I’d like to see this costuming win some awards. Chris Hemsworth steps up his game a bit and proves he may actually be able to carry more than just action roles.

The bad: Hoo boy. First of all, the tone shift. This movie starts dark and stays dark for a good clip, providing some truly wonderful nightmare fuel, and then bam. You go from a forest of hideous corpses and monsters to faeries riding bunny rabbits. It tries to tilt back and even out from there, but it just can’t find its footing tone-wise. Kristen Stewart does a better job here than in Twilight and manages one stirring speech, but once again she spends too much time looking vague and blank. Charlize Theron, on the other hand, overacts to a truly unbelievable degree. I was laughing out loud. The chemistry between the title characters falls short, as does the ending. And really, you don’t go into Snow White expecting a feminist storyline, but I can’t believe the amount they added to make it even more problematic.

TL;DR: This movie is great to look at—just don’t look too close.

Make no mistake here— you are not watching a John Landis film.

You are watching a Rick Baker film.

Holy offensiveness, Batman. This book oozed racism and misogyny. And I’m not referring to the plot itself— I’m referring to the author’s treatment of, and descriptions of, their own characters; the stereotyping, the fetishizing, and (the final straw for me) the casual, repeated use of rape as a lurid plot device. Every POC in this book is an exotic showpiece. Every woman in this book is a struggling victim. Good thing there’s a white man around to save the day.

I liked this concept. I liked where this allegory was headed. I even liked the run-on style that seems to have put a lot of other people off.

But I simply couldn’t get into this because of the translation. It was so stilted and unnatural. It was constantly pulling me out of the book and screaming TRANSLATION at me. I couldn’t keep going.

Got 41 pages in and gave up. It was like one of those painful movie scenes where a character turns and mugs cheesily at the camera— the entire thing.