Review #74: Eli (2019)


This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #22: Eli

Eli follows the story of a child suffering from an autoimmune disorder which has made him allergic to basically everything; his life has been torture but his parents are spending the last of their money to take him to a special doctor who has treated many people like him with an experimental gene therapy procedure. While in the spooky house/laboratory/hospital thing, Eli begins to see and hear things he shouldn't, leading him to believe the house is haunted- and that there may be more to the doctor's methods than everyone is telling him...

First things first- I thought this movie was very, very good..... Except the ending. The ending wasn't bad, exactly (I'll do my best not to spoil it) but after the big reveal I felt like the movie had a completely different tone, and I really, really liked the tone that the 70~ minutes before had, and not so much the tone of the last ~20 minutes. I thought the scares were terrifying, the setting was intriguing, and all of the characters had enough going on that I was constantly guessing at what secrets were going to be revealed as it went on.

Speaking of which, though, I guessed the big twist fairly early on; I didn't have much to base it off of but I consider myself fairly genre savvy, so whenever a movie has a setup like this one does I immediately start to wonder, "Hmm, how much you want to bet it's going to turn out that <spoilers redacted>?" I had lots of other conflicting guesses, so when it finally did get revealed it still came as a surprise, but like I said, the portion after that reveal kind of went in a completely different direction than I had been gearing up for so it ended kind of disappointingly. I also expected a callback to the part earlier on where the kids were making fun of Eli (I felt it would have been a nice little button on the end of the film) but that never happened.

Aside from the ending not being what I wanted I really don't have anything negative to say about this movie; it was paced really well and I was engaged the whole time. I'm tempted to go back and watch it again to see if I notice any clever details but given there's still eight more days to the month I doubt I will.

Overall rating: 9/10

Another Movie I Kept Flashing Back To: Scary Movie 2 (of all films), what with the connection to The Haunting, the spooky scenes wandering the halls, and much of the dialogue during the climactic ending scene

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review #153: The Endless (2018)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #8 - The Endless (2018) A disclaimer: Most of this review is going to be me complaining about the logistics and mechanics of this movie, and it's going to be full of spoilers. I'll try to summarize my non-mechanical thoughts as concisely as possible. The Endless is an interesting film created by writing/directing duo Benson and Moorhead. Apart from Spring (which to my knowledge doesn't fit into this film's universe, though I could be mistaken) this was the first Benson & Moorhead joint I'd seen, and I was instantly intrigued by the premise: two brothers escaped a cult ten years ago, and after hearing that the cult was seemingly getting ready to kill themselves, they go back for one last visit to get some closure. When they get there, they realize that the cult's supernatural beliefs seem to be true, and they get caught up in a strange web of timey-wimeyness under the u...
Read more

Review #259: Strangeland (1998)

Image
This review was originally written in October 2023. Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #13 - Strangeland (1998) Strangeland follows a detective, Mike, whose daughter gets abducted, raped, and tortured by CaptHowdy (played by Snider), a local sadist with an obsession for body modification (tribal tattoos, extensive piercings, and even self-torture used to achieve enlightenment) who uses 90s chat rooms to find and lure victims. After getting a lead when someone discovers and recognizes CaptHowdy's septum jewelry at a crime scene, we're treated to the most absurd cat-and-mouse game I've ever seen between Mike and the kidnapper: Mike finds CaptHowdy in a chat room while posing as his niece, and CaptHowdy looks at Mike's fake profile. Mike changes his profile to include one of CaptHowdy's interests, and CaptHowdy immediately notices the change and somehow automatically recognizes it as an indicator that Mike is actually a cop conducting a sting operation. When the st...
Read more

Review #268: Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

Image
This review was originally written in October 2023. Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #22 - Thir13en Ghosts (2001) Thirthirteenen Ghosts is a film about Arthur, a down-on-his luck widower, who finds out that his weird uncle Cyrus has died and left his state-of-the-art mansion to him and his children (and his live-in nanny I guess). But when they move in, it turns out that the house isn't just a house- it's an infernal machine with twelve ghosts trapped inside with a mechanism that's going to open a portal to hell or something, and the only way to stop it is for Arthur to sacrifice himself (and become the thirteenth ghost). But there may be more at play than just a dead uncle's plot... First things first, while I think there's a lot that's really cool about this movie, I do need to say right at the top that it's a bad movie. The writing has its moments but is ultimately a bunch of nonsense, the acting is over-the-top from every single person on screen, t...
Read more