The Hatred (2017)

The first 21 minutes & 10 seconds was amazing, thanks to Andrew Divoff!!! Wanted to buy it!!! Then the other hour & thirteen minutes happened. Lost all the stars except one... Love Andrew Divoff!

Saw 'The Hatred, being fond of horror/thriller regardless of budget (even if not my favourite genre) and being intrigued somewhat by the idea. Being behind on my film watching and reviewing, with a long to watch and review list that keeps getting longer, it took me a while to get round to reviewing it.Unfortunately, despite not reading any reviews purposefully before watching, am going to have to agree with all the reviewers who hated 'The Hatred'. A film that started off pretty good, but ran out of steam very quickly and rapidly got worse by a second half that makes one not want to keep watching. Never judge a film without seeing the whole thing and wanted to give 'The Hatred', so gave it a fair chance.Best thing about 'The Hatred' is the first twenty minutes, which start things off on a very promising and atmospheric note.Setting was also quite nice and spooky.However, so much brings 'The Hatred' down. The cast struggle to do much with so little to do and the direction is so phoned in and pedestrian, one gets the sense that the director showed no interest in the film at all. Too much of the soundtrack is intrusive and annoying, made worse by the excessive and obvious sound effects that just cheapens the mood. The film looks drab generally and like it was made in haste.Where 'The Hatred' most underwhelms is the writing and story. The writing is incredibly lazy, it's awkward in dialogue, very confused as a result of not tying things up or going into full detail and doesn't feel complete. The story suffers from a very limp pace after the first twenty minutes and gets slower and slower until an interminably dragged out second half. It further suffers from feeling too much like a short film stretched out with a lot of useless padding. A few of the characters are reasonably likeable but the inconsistent and illogical motivations bring them down. For a film billed as a horror, though it's more a thriller with horror elements, there is very little interesting and nothing remotely scary. They are too few and are far too predictable, anaemic and weakly timed to make impact, with the dull pacing and obvious sound effects cheapening them significantly. In terms of the thriller elements, 'The Hatred' doesn't engage let alone thrill, the film started off very well but feels wasted by how quickly everything runs out of steam. Worst of all is the ending, which is so abrupt, unresolved and incomplete that one struggles to even consider it an ending, the film just ends and leaves one scratching their heads in confusion and feeling cheated.Overall, the potential was there but the execution far from was. Really bad, unless you're curious about seeing it it's best to avoid this. 2/10 Bethany Cox

What a mess. Instead of using flashbacks, letting the viewer tease out the mystery, the writers just plop it all out in the first 20-minutes. It's 1968, on an orchard in what is implied to be upstate New York (where oranges grow in an inexplicably arid, sun drenched landscape). A super controlling, former father and Hitler aide (or maybe concentration camp "doctor" as is hinted later), dominates his teen daughter and doormat wife. His chief hobbies: taxidermy (mostly of rodents), safekeeping Nazi memorabilia in the basement of the farmhouse, and spraying for pests, while wearing a leather trench coat and World War One era gas mask (producers hoping for a franchise character?). A delivery of a mysterious package containing an iconic amulet, and a letter from a Hitler aide (Hitler is apparently still alive in 1968) gets the movie off and running. Fast forward to today. Four vapid, boy-chasing, wine swilling students travel to the farm house to baby sit the grade school daughter of their college professor (David Naughton!). We later learn, in what may be a scripting goof, that the professor, his wife and the rather annoying child moved in to the farm house earlier that day. But, for no apparent reason they are now, at mid-morning, headed off on a trip, entrusting the little girl to the air-head students for a week.We then get:--20 to 30 minutes of incessant chatter from the girls, fueled by a raid on the household wine supply. --Later: more wine at a lunch-time picnic, some snooping about the barn and later the house, prying into file boxes and what ever else is stored in the basement and in a "forbidden" sewing room. --Next: wine in the living room, and the introduction of a medical sub-plot which is mostly unrelated, petering out after a minute or two. --Then the much predicted thunderstorm strikes and a festival of mayhem and haunted house cliches ensue! Here there are a few good jump scares, but that's about it. The end is unsatisfactory in the extreme. I had fun mentally cataloging all the unanswered questions and plot plight failures. I love bad movies. But if you are serious about haunted house movies, look elsewhere.

This movie started very slowly (but not a bad thing) focusing on an ex-Nazi in his new life in America with a wife and daughter with whom he is viciously strict with. this part of the story goes on so long that you think it's the main plot, but after he kills his daughter, and then gets killed by his wife, it jumps ahead to modern day, with a group of young women who are staying in the house for reasons not fully explained with a young girl called Irene. From there, it becomes a straightforward Ghost story type thing, with jump scares and running around the house and such. During such time, the women start digging up apparent clues about the ex-Nazi who used to own the house, including the odd gift of a Wehrmacht-looking Iron Cross amulet with inscriptions on it that is apparently of the occult or supernatural.before he died, the ex-Nazi received this as a gift apparently from another Nazi. He carves a hole in his basement workshop, hides the amulet in there, then seals it off with cement. Sporadically throughout the movie, this sealed off spot mysteriously bleeds the image of the iron cross onto it. throughout, Irene claims to be talking to Alice, the murdered daughter of the ex-Nazi, and at some point in the end, Alice's ghost appears to the main character Regan and leads her to where he hid her body. Regan then takes an amulet from her body and escapes with Irene. Then the movie abruptly ends. Nothing involving the seemingly supernatural Iron Cross thing ended up having anything to do with the plot, despite being the subject of a mid-story expo dump via online search. Very little was actually done with the plot elements introduced, as if the person directing or editing the film promptly forgot about everything they initially set up and just went for a quick end