Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'Hungerford' (2014)

My fucking GOD this movie was actively painful to watch. And as "Shaky Camera" goes, the acting actually wasn't shit, so it doesn't fall into the same category of failure as The Bay for instance. This movie didn't even fail because it was a good movie ruined by Shaky Camera like The Taking of Deborah Logan. Though, it had some of those failed elements. This movie failed because it was a shit premise, with a shit execution, using shit trope, and shit effects. The fact that it's Shaky Camera is just pissing into a river of shit.

But I'll give them this. The main cast, and even most of the general cast, were actually pretty decent actors by horror standards. They managed to sell completely unbelievable motivations and acted appropriately under even the most ridiculous on screen stimulus. I hope it doesn't kill their careers or convince them to stop making art. Sometimes you fall in the mud... sometimes you fall into a river of sewage. Either way, all you can do is clean yourself off and keep going.

Now, because the atmosphere is Shaky Camera, there’s really not much to speak of. And I get it. That’s the reason we have Shaky Camera as a horror genre. You can’t always budget FX into your shit production. And you could tell they had a lot of shit FX to cover up. I can’t even say they were particularly gratuitous with the Shaky Camera. It got bad, but that’s not really what killed the movie. No, it was just shit writing.

If you couldn't guess. I'm not recommending this shit show. (SPOILERS)

This movie couldn't decide if it wanted to be Night of the Creeps or Cloverfield. Fucking seriously. It starts off just like Cloverfield with a mysterious explosion and something flying through the streets, and even has a scene with the main character trying to get to his recently estranged girlfriend. It's like Night of the Creeps because it's a parasite zombie flick. Already not much of an original thought. The movie relies heavily on the damsel in distress trope, so much so, it does it more than once with more than one character. It includes an obvious "fix all" cure for the parasite, which is just spray on deodorant. And then finally, the big reveal is aliens. Because this absolute cesspool needed a reason. Aliens.

And the motivations of the main cast were just impossible to stand behind. The love interest of the main character rejects him because her friend vomits blood at her party, and for ZERO reason she blames the main character's friend. And then HE has to act like he fucking thinks his friend might have done it, also with ZERO reason. And they pull that shit off. So after that, after being rejected by his love interest, she tells him she never wants to speak to him again, that he's a fucking loser and will never amount to anything. After being delivered that blow as a character, the actor has to sell that his character actually wants to save this bitch.

There was also a lot about the parasites that didn't make much sense. Most of it you could just suspend your disbelief like the size of the bugs vs. the size of the hole they leave in the back of your neck. But what were they trying to accomplish? Like the creatures in The Faculty they should have been trying to propagate in secret. They could efficiently spread this way. And they clearly had intelligence as the one character accounts hearing it talk to him in his head. But instead they have the host go all agro on most people, only grabbing a few here or there, but not to infect, to bring back and... eat? Lay eggs in? They really don't go into it and the presentation just doesn't make any fucking sense.

Yeah, fuck this movie.