Horror Movie Review - Oculus

I just got through watching Oculus. I enjoyed most Katee Sackhoff as Marie Russell. Katee is known for her roles in Longmire, Battlestar Galactica, and Riddick. Also, the ghost Marisol Chavez was hot - sort of - as she is played by Kate Siegel.

This was the first film of Mike Flanagan's that I have seen. I thought there was a lot of lost potential in story, lost on "tricks" or hallucinations brought on by Marisol and her ghostly crew of past victims. It reminded me of an old Nintendo 64 game called "Eternal Darkness". Excellent game. In it, there would be times when you would fall to wild hallucinations - after the first few times however, this gets old. Where it is a side-quirk in "Eternal Darkness", it is the plot engine of "Oculus".

It seems movies that are recognized as having an inherent quality in them, as having potential, are designed to be adapted to many sequels, thus subtracting from that initial quality. I'm sure that's part of what retarded the story telling here. We did get a little history from the victims of the mirror from Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan), but it was spat out in such a frenzy, I couldn't follow it. That had its reason though - as there was a battle of world views between Kaylie and her brother Alan Russell (Rory Cochrane). The skeptic and the believer. Good arguments are fascinating. In fact, Alan is so convincing, he had his sister as well as myself convinced.

At this point the movie became less interesting. Too many tricks and not enough treats. Then the timeline becomes blurred, making things even more confusing.

There was one scene that was really well done - little girl Kaylie opens the door to her dad's study, and sees Marisol standing over her seated father in a position that can only be described as "feeding". Marisol then floats backwards out of the scene, and immediately reemerges from behind the door. That was creepy, and spoke to the vampiric nature of the entity.

The other thing I didn't like was how much power Marisol had - she could easily manipulate the perceptions of people, making them think they were seeing something that was not there, making them think they were somewhere they were not....   That sort of strong delusion is fine when carried out in dreams - we all can accept it there - but as I stated, it seemed here a rather cheap way to present the majority of the supernatural phenomenon - as tricks. I really liked the idea of setting up parameters around the mirror, to try to nail the supernatural down. This reminds me of what allegedly some scientists did out on Skinwalker Ranch - I'm not talking about the movie by the same name, but the actual ranch. They had all this equipment, and the phenomenon would take place, and always some element would have prevented them from capturing the evidence of it. It's a unique idea here that the entity was using the people setting up the experiment to unknowingly sabotage it themselves....

I would give it 6 out of 10 stars. I hated the ending. I hated that it was spliced with their past. And SPOILER ALERT:

I hated how Kaylie died. That was really cheap. There are a lot of questions to be answered, which I hope will be brought to light in future installments...