MOVIE REVIEW: Dead Mary

Oh how I love to watch movies on TV. Instead of wasting 1 hour 40 minutes on a crappy film, I spent 2 hours 20 minutes watching Dead Mary on Dusk, a channel which has a commercial break every 10 minutes. Definitely not worth my time.

A group of old friends - a recently broken up couple, a new couple, a married couple and a single friend - reunite to spend a weekend at a remote cabin in the woods. One drunken night they decide to play Dead Mary. Dead Mary is a game which is basically a clone of Bloody Mary, except as they explain in the movie, "Bloody Mary is the lame version." They take turns repeating Dead Mary in the mirror three times and go to bed afterward, only to be woken up in the middle of the night by screaming. One of them is dead and one of them is a killer. But what would possess someone to murder one of their friends? Or who?

As you can see, the plot is fairly cliched and unoriginal - except that instead of having a ghost/demon/ghoul/zombie summoned from the repetition of her name in the mirror, she possesses one of the friends and the film becomes a sort of whodunit, with the group trying to figure out who the killer is. But too much of the film concerns a dull subplot about who has been sleeping with who, which drastically slows the plot, having murders interspersed with heated arguments about cheating.

Dead Mary has only one setting and very little action, so I looked to the characters to immerse myself in the film, but not a single one was likable. They were all cheaters or self-centered or weak or stupid. Actually they were all pretty stupid (let's wait for 24 hours and when it's nighttime, everyone is almost everyone is dead and it's pouring rain, we'll go for help). The unlikable characters made an already weak film almost unbearable.

And the ending gave no answers, or even a resolution. There was no explanation of who Dead Mary was, how the legend started or why she possesses and kills people.

But for all my complaints Dead Mary has some redeeming qualities. A few scenes are atmospheric: walking through the pitch black woods in the middle of the night, hearing strange noises barely audible over the sound of crickets, but knowing that something is out there and then: BAM! it jumps out of nowhere. Although that scene gave me chills, the whole film isn't worth watching just for it.

Rating: 2/5