The Girl in the Photographs (2015)

Colleen (Claudia Lee) is a check out girl in the small town of Spearfish, S.D. (actual place filmed on location). She finds photos of what appear to be dead girls with the face mutilated beyond recognition. The cops can't find a crime or anything illegal. She is on her own. We know she has a boyfriend Ben (Toby Hemingway) she has been blowing off. Peter Hemmings (Kal Penn) is an obnoxious photographer from the same town. He reads Colleen's blogs about the photos and opts to take his crew of models to Spearfish to shoot them in death poses. Rose (Miranda Rae Mayo) is one of the models and the current girlfriend of Peter and they carry on a love-hate relationship filled with barbs.We see the killers, first with masks and then without. Their characters were never developed. The theme is stated early on "There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit". - William S. BurroughsPeter builds upon that theme and claims, "We covet what we see everyday" i.e. the cashier in a way is a local celebrity, seen and admired by many.The film also used some decent "B" stars, one of which I really liked and they wax her in the first scene. Kal Penn carried much of the film with his lines and eccentric nonsense. And while this was a "slasher" film in that people are horrifically killed, it didn't feel like a slasher as the photography displaced much of it. The film is more developed than most horrors, but (plot spoiler?) there is no clever twist.Guide: F-word, sex, nudity (Autumn Kendrick) throats cut, blood squirts.

While I was intrigued with this movie at the beginning, I could not for the life of me get the meaning. If he was in love with her why kill her???? As for "Colleen", I find it hard to believe that she could be in her bathroom and not know there was somebody in her bedroom - which was directly next to her bathroom. As for "Peter and Chris", did they not see "Tom's" truck - AGAIN - as it was leaving the parking lot. After all, they left a business card on it when they first got in town. The ending is really stupid - is Colleen dead or not. I just thought this movie could have been better. Kal Penn cursing was more hilarious than anything.

I understand to a point why people desire the revival of the slasher flick. In the 70's you had Halloween. In the 80s you had Friday the 13th and Elm Street. In the 90's you had I Know What You Did Last Summer and the Scream franchise. The fact is these are Classics that cannot be touched which is why most got remade. The girl in the photographs does not try to be those films which perhaps is why some were disappointed. I thought the movie was filmed well and the cast was good with the exception of the leading lady. Watching her was like watching Kristen Stewart in the first Twilight movie. She was one note, monotone and forgettable which is really unacceptable seeing as how our villain becomes obsessed with her when there wasn't anything to be obsessed about. She was lacking personality extremely. She mostly just came off as a bitch reminiscent of the stone-faced actress that acted opposite Channing Tatum in Magic Mike. Having said that there were some problems with the script. There's absolutely no character development for our leading lady and absolutely no character development for our villains either. You get the impression that they're brothers but that's never said. There's nothing to make you give a crap about the "star". Does she have parents? Was she hatched from an egg? Did she grow up in this town or just move there? All we know is she has an ex boyfriend that she doesn't want to talk to for a reason that's never said and she works in the grocery store. It's pretty easy not to care about most of the characters since most of them are shallow which is fine it's always nice to see dumb shallow pretty people get killed off in horror movies. The truth is the real star of this film is The Mastermind villain. His performance reminded me of the young villain in the first Purge movie. He was very strange and perfectly creepy like a stalker should be. I love that I couldn't tell what he was going to do next and that he was enjoying it. All and all I think the villains were pretty perfect aside from their lack of backstory. Other holes in the plot include if it's such a small town how does no one notice these people missing? How long have these guys been doing this? Why are the cops such idiots? I love discovering good new villains. That's what makes this movie worth a sit-down. I thought the masks were creative. The kills not so much but man just a little bit more story and some recasting and the film would have been a lot better. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's not an in-your-face slasher flick where loud orchestrated music plays as the villain jumps out very Scream style. It's more along the lines of Kiss the Girls just not as good but we can't all be James Patterson.

This film drowns in monotony as it ultimately leaves the viewer in a literal state of "can they please just kill these people so this film can end" for an extended amount of time, mostly the last twenty minutes of the film. Losing patience to such a degree means that all feeling for the cast has been lost or in this case never felt to begin with, this is obviously a big problem for a horror film when even the fate of the innocent young lead(Claudia Lee) loses importance. Nick Simon fails to create any atmosphere throughout as well as suspense and tension. There may have been a few small jolts of electricity, but they dissolve almost instantaneously.Despite being well produced, shot and acted with lots of pretty faces and even some nice T&A, this film just doesn't succeed in being what could have been a more engaging horror flick had some serious editing and script adjustment been applied.But in the end I'm still a horror junkie and I have to judge the overall package against it's fellow B horror competitors and there is enough here to possibly warrant some degree of entertainment for those with the same genre affliction, there were some OK kills and to be completely honest the picture the killers leave for the girl in the final seconds was brilliantly done, though a photo cannot undo the overall average plot and mundane feel to this film.