The Reeds (2010)

I stumbled across this recently on Lovefilm and it seemed an interesting idea. The cast is pretty natural and includes the always watchable Will Mellor. The characters are thankfully quite likable which is rare for a horror movie and makes you care more about what happens to them. The setting on the Norfolk broads is stunning and quite eerie which is of a huge benefit to the film. It's certainly not a place you'd want to be stranded. This isn't an out and out horror more of a ghost story but there is a nice air of tension built up throughout and some creepy scenes. You will probably guess what's going on from a long way out but it's handled so well it doesn't really matter. For a film with a very modest budget this is an impressive effort and I found it very enjoyable.

At first I was not expecting a great movie, most reviews where low and said the plot was just gibberish or blurry. But when I saw the film, I noticed, those people hoped just for the general, slasher horror film, where something is somewhere slaugthering the group.But let me start at the beginning:The story starts with some friends from London renting a boat to party and get lost in the nowhere. Here most people already are turning their brains off, thinking about the usual teenager horror flick, but no. These people are more adult, acting more reasonable and not predictable in a horror film way of sense, but in a more logical sense. Which is refreshing, if you ask me! The acting is good, the faces new and not well known. Their British and the scenery (some kind of reeds covered swamp) not to much exploited.While being lost, they meet some really strange teenagers. (Spoiler, from her on you need to keep aware of what is happening more carefully).A bit later on, they kinda drove into something and one of the group get impaled by something, that was in the water, forcefully. Here it is a bit "overgored" but it's not too much.I don't want to spoiler too much, even though I warn of spoilers... it would ruin the film and the mood.The story is complicated, everything is connected somehow. This is the point, where some say it's too much and others (like me) say it's a really good story! It is rare for a film nowadays to be more than just entertainment but also giving you a story to follow, to connect clues and with such complex story and still making sense!I can recommend this film to everyone who wants to see a horror film, which is something else, way off from those gore and monster film. You won't be disappointed! In my opinion one of the best horror films I've seen so far! Everything is just above average and still, it is a budget movie from the U.K. Some of those American big players should stop coping Japanese or other horror films, or do sequels/prequels to already bleed out film series and focus on doing a story telling like in this film!

I'd say this film is more of a puzzling suspense film than a horror flick. It's a rather intelligently-written film, but it still didn't completely wow me. Again, the typical handful of young adults, this time in the setting of taking a boat through some reedy marsh-like area of the UK. For a long time, the entire movie feels like a jigsaw puzzle. We're shown glimpses of the whole, but we still can only guess what they all fit together to finally mean.Is it a basic madman slasher thing? Are they being haunted by ghosts? Dopplegangers? Ah, it's some weird temporal flux thing...but still, that only explains a piece of the overall mystery. Who's the guy in the hood with the gun? What's his beef exactly? This movie will do a good job for a lot of people to unsettle them because the audience keeps having to ask these questions. And as we're calmly asking questions, our main protagonists are panicking here and there at what they don't understand. So much of the suffering and death comes from this really wonderful plot device: when you experience something you don't understand, the worse part of you wants to panic. When you panic, you're prone to make bad decisions. When you make bad decisions, bad things happen and people get hurt. The fact that so many of our main characters just screwed themselves over because of this speaks to me of relatively smarter storywriting.However, this film isn't without its flaws. I said a lot of people would be unsettled by the nature of this film's storyline, but not me. Again, it felt more like a mystery movie than a horror flick, and the climax, while it still puts together enough of the pieces to satisfy us, didn't leave me feeling like much was really resolved. There's no real denouement, especially as we are led to believe with the final scene that the couple who "escaped" get caught back at the beginning of the entire temporal loop that messed them all up in the first place. Give a try, though; you might enjoy it.

To be honest, the movie at first really doesn't seem like a bad one at all. The first few minutes are nothing too great but at least it makes you think that its going to head into something decent and watchable, if only a tad bit formulaic. But as it turned out in the end, the movie was just an incredibly bad one.The movie is just very poorly done. It's an extremely bad handled horror-film, that tries to go into many different directions but none of them ever work out for one bit.A problem already lies with its concept. Seriously, what is so scary about the reeds in this movie, even though all of the characters try to make it seem like it's one of the scariest places to be in and they constantly get a bad feeling about things, just by driving a boat, at clear day. The movie its 'horror' really relies on its concept and settings, which were already incredibly lacking to begin with.But the biggest problem of the movie simply is the story itself. The movie is given a whole bunch of side-plots, which makes the movie as a whole all the more messy and confusing. And the movie already gets an incredibly messy and confusing one to begin with, during its second half. First of all, the movie is so incredibly dark that you can hardly tell what's going on, on screen and who's where and most importantly why. And second of all, lots of stuff just doesn't make sense. Like mentioned earlier, the movie combines lots of different horror elements, in an attempt to keep things interesting and also surprising but instead it makes things incredibly messy. You see people constantly running and looking scared, a ghostly figure appears, a strange sound can be heard but there is actually very little happening in the movie. It's not a boring one, the movie is too fast going for that but there is nevertheless not a whole lot happening in this movie.No way that this movie will please any horror fans, despite the fact that it still has basically all of the right ingredient in it, to make a decent, watchable horror film out of. The execution of it all is however far too poor and lacking for any of the horror to ever work out. The atmosphere is too dark, since you can't even tell what is happening, there is no gore, no effective scare moments and no real originality to it all, though the movie tries really hard to be. horror fans should simply stay away from this, as should everybody else.A failed attempt.3/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/