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Released by Bloody Earth Films
Released on: September 9th, 2014
Directed by: Brenden Steere
Cast: Tracy Willet, Marcin Paluch, Stephan Goldbach
Year: 2013
The Movie:
Strange things begin to happen when married couple Carrie (Tracy Willet) and Mike (Marcin Paluch) move into a house in the woods. When Carrie hears strange noises and comes in contact with an ill-tempered, gun-toting maniac she is ready to call the police. Mike is able to defuse the situation and cools her down. However, after Carrie discovers an intruder in their house and has a second run-in with the neighbor she will not let her husband talk her out of leaving. It is then when the real horror begins for Carrie.
The key highlight of Animosity is the film's central mystery, what exactly is happening to Carrie and why? So, while the film is not all that suspenseful nor frightening it is able to keep the viewer interested for the first half of the film. However, after it is finally revealed what is happening to Carrie the film loses steam. Part of the problem is the film's length. At a tad over 100 minutes, Animosity is just too long and the film runs out of things to do. To pad the time, the filmmakers give the audience never ending scenes of characters delivering lines of exposition. This becomes tiring and leads the viewer to constantly watch the clock.
Along with the obvious exposition, much of the film's dialogue was problematic. None of the characters sounded like real people. Creating authentic sounding dialogue can be difficult and unless a writer has a knack for it, characters can sound phony. Unfortunately, this is the case in Animosity. Much of the dialogue sounded like what a screenwriter thinks everyday conversations sound like. Not only would the film have benefited from a rewrite to fix dialogue, it also would have been worthwhile to drop a subplot involving the neighbor and tighten the action.
With that said, Animosity is not a horrible film. The acting, while not uniformly good, is decent and watchable. Tracy Willet grew on me as the film progressed. I am not sure if her performance became stronger or I just began to feel compassion for her as she continued to be abused. Either way, her performance is the acting ensemble's strongest and helped the film immensely as it began to limp to its conclusion.
Another positive was the film featured several moments of levity. Although I cannot be sure if these moments were completely intentional, they sure felt like it. A wacky “surprise†visitor and a briefly seen film-within-a-film were goofy enough to let the audience know the filmmakers had a sense of humor. The writer/director, Brenden Steere, was also wise enough to not try and create an explanation for the house's mystery. Somethings are best not explained, and why the house had supernatural powers is one such mystery.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Bloody Earth Films' DVD release of Animosity is offered in a passable anamorphic 1.77:1 video presentation. The copy I viewed had some digital artifacts popping up from time-to-time but it was not too distracting. The cinematography for the most part is clean but looks cheap. The lighting is flat and does nothing to create a sense of dread or fear, even when Carrie is fighting for her life.
The Dolby 2.0 audio is decent, however there are moments when the dialogue is mixed way too low. The film's score is uninspired and feels typical for a low-budget, modern horror film.
Bloody Earth packed the release with extras. There are two audio commentary tracks featuring the director with members of the cast and crew, a short (3 minute) behind the scenes music video, the 1-minute film-within-a-film, Demon's Bite, a trailer for the film, and a trailer vault featuring a selection of trailers for Bloody Earth Films various releases.
The Final Word:
Even though the film loses its way about 40 minutes in, Animosity is not all bad. There is a nice leading performance and a few laughs that prevent the film from being a total waste. That said, the film is way too long and is not a truly effective horror film.
