This simply wasn’t a good movie.
It’s overlong, tedious, and what was marketed as a fresh perspective regarding the killer’s pov is just dull. We don’t have to pretend bad entertainment is good.
During one of the excessively long, snoozey killer-walking-through-the-forest shots, I can imagine the light and sound guys nervously looking at each other behind the director’s back like, “uh… is he gonna say cut?”
No, the director thought he was making brilliant cinema, but it’s actually an ego-driven sleeping pill. He *thought* he was serving us something genius.
He’s not.
I feel like the lack of editing is arrogant, vain and off-putting. Inability to edit one’s ideas is a handicap and alienates anyone outside your own head. The shots in this movie are too long, uninteresting, and are less horror and more like I’m listening to a stranger drone on monotonously, telling a story second hand. The makeup effects are low quality. The back of the killer’s head and neck look like The Haunted Mask from Goosebumps. But, this movie is *much* less fun than a Goosebump’s book.
The lack of a score perpetuates my staggering disinterest in this movie. Scenes like the handicapable killer digging himself out of his grave would’ve been greatly enhanced by musical punctuation. Consider the iconic scores of Halloween and Friday the 13th, that music is as much a character as Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Even those 5 descending synth notes in Nightmare on Elm Street are immediately recognizable. The orchestral strikes from Psycho literally stabbing us sonically? Amazing. I suspect once again, that the director thought his film was just so good it didn’t *need* music. Barf and also yawn.
In A Violent Nature is a neighborhood cover band doing Friday the 13th, badly. We don’t have to say bad entertainment is good. And this is bad.