Kristy (2014)

Let me start off by saying this movie is completely worth a 10 star review. The only thing keeping me from giving this is that I thought the main character made some dumb decisions at points which seemed unnatural to the character the movie had set her up to be. Along with this I was upset at a few of the decisions made in the fates of some characters. But overall this movie is one of my favorites ever. I've always loved movies with a strong, smart main character who does not take any crap from anyone. The cryptic-ness of the explanation behind the use of Kristy was quite interesting and led to a very powerful ending and overall the whole movie satisfied everything I look for in a horror movie. The creepiness, the almost ghostly-haunted feel of the empty campus and how alone the main character truly was along with the smart decisions and quick-thinking she showed all put the movie into a smart and believable horror movie.I cannot recommend this movie enough, please watch.

Sigh. I'm getting really tired of some of the poor horror offerings on Netflix. Kristy is a fairly dull rehash of two modern trends in horror. First, it's a home invasion flick. The twist is... it's on a college campus! The other trend is the general premise brought to popularity by The Purge - an organized, but fairly random approach to killing strangers for the fun of it.I had a hard time getting through this. It's fairly slow-moving. The longer I watched it, I found myself feeling like Justine was just... not that bright. She drives a car. A bad guy is on the hood, trying to break through the glass. She speeds up, eventually crashing the car into a wall, crushing the bad guy. Okay... but I kept wondering why she didn't just speed up, then hit the brakes, throwing the guy at the wall, and keeping the car functional for herself?Late in the movie, we get a reveal, when Justine removes a mask from one of her assailants. Something about the direction kept making me think that I was supposed to recognize this person.Some people might like this, but it just didn't seem as polished as I expected.Where the story goes wrong is in the last minute or two. Giving a touch of explanation for what has happened to Justine is a good idea. Setting up for an absurd sequel where she decides to go off hunting these people down? Less of a promise, and more of a threat.

Before I start the review I want to say Haley Bennett, who played the lead, Justine, did a great job. You can feel the struggle she is facing between having to work her way through college, having a rich boyfriend who doesn't completely get it, and being a tired student. I see she's playing the lead in the upcoming movie The Girl on the Train. The book was very good, and I can see Haley playing the part wonderfully.Having spent some holidays alone at college over various vacations, this movie peaked my interest. Although this must be a very small college because she is the only student there. Makes for a good movie, but not very realistic. There are two security guards and another guy who's house is just on the outskirts of campus. The opening of the film begins with a young woman being chased down and killed. There's shaky camera work, and I was concerned that the rest of the movie would be like this, but thankfully it wasn't.You get a sense of the Kristy Cult and why they are killing. Kristys are women who are pretty, and pure, and have a good life. Although I'm not sure how they know they are pure, but we're just along for the ride. Kristy comes from Christ (although Kristy could be spelled Christy, but I guess that's too close to Christ and might confuse us??) And I think they are killing them because they don't like God. To me, this part could have been left out. But perhaps they thought people just killing because they are psycho would leave too many questions for the audience, so they needed a reason.After that beginning it turned amusing. There was a cheap shot made for the audience to jump, and the flickering lights were explained away well enough. Then we break out into a montage where Justine is dancing around the dorms Breakfast Club style. We also see that she is very athletic from the run she takes and the swimming she does. I will say, I would have been screwed if I was her, because she did a lot of running from the killers.Justine goes on a last minute run to the gas station before the guy at the security booth goes home for the night. At the station she meets a weird woman, Violet, with lip piercings and what looked like Meth teeth. There's a confrontation at the checkout that leaves Justine a bit shaken up.Getting back to campus, she warns Wayne, the security guard, to be on the lookout for the weirdo from town. And then the fun begins.The lights start flickering even more, and although Justine has an uneasy feeling, she takes her sweet time getting back to her room. When she gets back there, a video of the various girls that have been killed by the Kristy Cult is playing on her computer. Then her computer goes out and she can't get a signal. The door slowly starts to open, and we see Violet standing behind her.Cue the cat and mouse scenes, which I will say were pretty good. My biggest problem is when she goes into the kitchen (that she works at) and doesn't grab a knife, or even a frying pan. She does do a couple of other things to throw the killers off, so that was good. Then they're running all over campus, lots of tension building up, and I was yelling at the TV. I was getting really annoyed, mainly with the key issue. Justine needed a key to get into the doors, and it would have taken her a second, but it didn't seem like she locked any of the doors behind her. Even when the killers were not that close. Also at the beginning it seemed like a lot of the dorm doors were open. If everyone went home for the holidays, they would have all been locked. And if Justine had locked her door, there is a good chance it would have took the killers a lot longer to find her.The movie did redeem itself towards the end though. I enjoyed it, and they did bring the Kristy Cult full circle. If you enjoy cat and mouse thrillers, with a tough heroine, I would say you should watch this one.

Kristy starts out like any other slasher flick; a timid girl finds herself alone in a secluded area, only to be hunted by a masked stranger or group of strangers who fill the urge to slaughter with pseudo religious or radically moral motifs that ultimately cast no bearing on the events that unfold. Halloween drove home the idea of Michael seeking out Laurie due to their bloodline only after a barrage of sequels, and Jason became an embodiment of his mother's revenge only after Steve Miner took up the reigns. Watching Kristy feels like tuning into a sequel well into its second act, where blood splatters and teens run for reasons unknown to us. There's something amiss in the terror that reverberates from the lungs of our scream queen, and with Kristy it's in the form of a strewn together intro that collects fuzzy and distorted found footage kills from our group of outcasts that feel pieced together from a previous movie. It causes us to feel disconnected from the onslaught of dread that oozes from the chase, and perhaps it works as our timid girl Justine (Haley Benett) never once fills the dead of night with her panic. It's a lacking horror trope that feels refreshing and separates Kristy from the rest, similar to what Adam Wingard brought to the screen with 2011's exceptional You're Next. Watching Kristy take on a group of masked thugs, transitioning from scared to stoic is invigorating for the genre, but boring for us. It causes a lack of palpability on director Oliver Blackburn's part, turning Kristy into a well-crafted chase flick with a strong lead rather than a finely tuned slasher. What ultimately drives Kristy further away from our warm embrace is its lack of commitment to its killer's motives, staggering here and there with talks of a purge or cleanse that feels like a cheap moralistic add-on, when the real horror comes from the unknown. Haley commits to Justine, while our hooded ring leader Violet (Ashley Greene) tepidly coasts through her Hot Topic phase with dry air and plummeting energy. There's more life in her masked goons than a single moody gaze, who come off as cosplays of Doctor Doom at Comic-Con than anything else, yet make it work due to the DIY nature of it all. While it may be beautifully shot, it's considerably unfocused, a fitfully paced slasher that loses itself in its attempts at injecting the genre with something fresh, causing the rest of Kristy to quickly decompose.