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stephendelp99
Reviews
The Invited (2010)
What an embarrassment for Sacramento
No one looks forward to writing a scathing review of a movie. I think most would say that one always looks to be genuinely entertained when spending one's money on a ticket. Who WANTS to be disappointed going into a flick? No one. Which is the attitude I went in with when seeing this movie at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento last month. OH MY GOD. This ninety-some-odd-minute painful excuse of a film was, hands down, the worst movie I have ever viewed in my 30 years of watching movies. I do not mean this to be cruel to the filmmaker or the cast; I mean it literally. Absolute drivel from start to finish with some of the most melodramatic, cliché and predictable dialogue ever put to paper. I love a good horror flick as much as anyone, but there was nothing, not one single thing, in this movie that was scary or even admirable where horror film-making is concerned. Why? Because the filmmaker apparently decided to employ every and any "scary" device or trick or sound effect he'd ever heard or seen before in a horror movie and it therefore backfired as unrelenting silly moments of predictable cliché. By the way, what's with Pam Grier showing up at the house with this bizarre "slave accent", only to have that same silly accent disappear once they're all up in the attic? I took additional offense to this movie once I learned that the director is an acting coach in Sacramento. I repeat. OH MY GOD. Like Simon Cowell chewing out horrible singers when he learns that some of them are "singing teachers" back in their hometown, he should have this director standing before him; he'd have a field day with McKinney. The acting in The Invited is so bad - Lou Diamond Phillips being the worst of the lot - that the filmmaker might find it prudent to switch his credit to an Allen Smithee film. No joke. This movie could literally kill his business as an acting coach. Then again, would that be so bad? A famous director once said, "With such easy access nowadays to digital film-making cameras and editing tools, virtually anyone can be a filmmaker. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY NECESSARILY SHOULD. If The Invited is representative of the quality and caliber of film-making in the Sacramento region, then Sacramento film-making is indeed in deep s--t.