After an unprecedented amount of success for the fairly average Blair Witch Project, director Eduardo Sánchez hasn’t had the best of times making a great follow up; with the poorly received sequel to Project not exactly setting the world ablaze, and the average Altered on his resume, he must have been hoping his muse of Lovely Molly would give some breathing space; yet he should look somewhere else, because Molly doesn’t inspire at all.
Lovely Molly sees the titular Molly (in her debut role, Gretchen Lodge) move into her dead parent’s house with her just married husband. Since he’s off all the time truck driving, she lives a lonely life in a massive farmhouse. One night, the security alarms go off but there’s no one in the house, and no forced entry. Later on, the back door violently shakes suddenly when there’s someone there. These occurrences come at the same time as Molly is trying to deal with her haunted past, and the ways her paedophile father has affected her life; setting up a dark, psychological, path to go down.
It’s difficult to see what Sánchez is going for here; it appears that he’s putting in certain elements to suggest that it’s only Molly that’s having the weird kooky stuff happen to her, and that it’s all just in her head, but if it was intention to do ‘it’s just Molly’, then his ‘twist’ failed badly, as he also includes bits where other character see the odd occurrences around her, and the ending is less than subtle.
To be fair, the ‘it’s just Molly’ trail is set up perfectly well; it’s established that she’s a former drug user and is prone to slip into her “evil habit” again (although it’s hard to imagine taking one drag off a joint of weed would chuck you straight back into squirting meth into your arm, but then I’ve never taken anything so what do I know?), thus making her prone to being paranoid. Add in living in a massive old farmhouse, away from civilisation, and it’s set up very well for there to be an element or two of doubt, but the fact that her husband and sister have the same experience ruins it.
In a lot of other reviews, there’s been a lot of praise for newcomer lead Lodge for her performance and yet I don’t see much in it; she’s serviceable enough for a horror lead and, yes, she goes through a whole range of different emotions in the film, but you can’t say she does them particularly well; there’s no real stand-out pouring of emotion to make her noteworthy, and some of the ’emotional’ moments were comical (there was one ridiculous scene where she goes mad in front of her supervisor at work, and she was clearly channelling The Joker from The Dark Knight with her dialogue and crazy face!) She suffers a fair bit from being “too pretty to do job X” syndrome (if all the girls cleaning your local shopping centre were as good looking as Molly, you wouldn’t bother shopping online anymore), and while Lodge carries the film on her shoulders, and just about gets there all the way, she’s nowhere near as effective as some people will lead you to believe.
With Molly being made by one of the people behind Blair Witch Project, it’s surprising to see Sánchez keeping to what he knows and using a fair bit of Blair iconography in Molly. I doubt very much that the two are connected, yet in all the promotional work for Molly a lot of symbols and animal related images appear (similar to the ones seen in Blair); suggesting connections which aren’t really there, and, despite being in a different film style, not going over new territory. On a sidenote, I really don’t get why filmmakers now think it’s a cracking idea to spoil the film in the trailer; sure it’s meant to be a teaser, but when you show the ending, it smacks of limited ideas to make your film interesting.
Being another ‘found-footage’ film, you have to question why it’s being used as a technique in something like this; apart from looking cool it doesn’t add anything to the film. Actually, it doesn’t look cool at all since there’s been a few films out this year that do it a lot better (take Chernobyl Diaries for example). There needs to be a reason why they’re recording the events going on, and simply documenting what’s occurring is not valid because it’s too easy, nor “oh well, I’m just going to record just for the sake of it”. Plus, do people actually use camcorders now days? We’ve got smart phones and all that… oh dear, I just invented the “smart phone found-footage” genre of film. Sorry about that!
There are some interesting moments of horror; the creepy singing of the Lovely Molly lullaby, and the heavy hoof-like walking noises add to the mood of fear on screen, and whilst it’s clearly been crowbarred out of Silent Hill, the little girl crying in the storeroom when no one’s there is truly uncomfortable viewing. All the references to horses are creepy (with pictures of their heads replacing people’s faces in photographs) but if you’re not really fond of them anyway it would have that effect.
Lovely Molly has such a strange mix of good and bad horror film elements, but unfortunately it’s not really recommended viewing, unless you’re okay with Sánchez covering old ground with a bigger budget. There’s an okay lead, and moments of interest, but as fancy as she is, Lovely Molly ain’t as lovely as she makes out to be.
Terry Lewis – @thatterrylewis.
