This film begins in a rather uncharacteristic way: a young girl who is a screenwriter and is trying to recover from a destructive love relationship decides to isolate herself in an old and remote mansion in order to be able to finish a new script within the deadlines. However, the house hides a mystery surrounding the previous tenants who will tinker with her head. Okay, nothing new here. It's the usual light horror thriller, blending "haunted house" with "psychopathic killer coming to kill the girl", seasoned with "found footage" and served with such a lack of originality that it becomes very predictable and lacks any tension or suspense. How am I going to feel tense or stay tuned to the screen if I know what's going to happen? Things get better when the story of Lucy, the previous inhabitant, begins to develop, giving a dramatic and human touch to a story very empty until then. In a way, we are more able to care for Thora Birch's character than the main one, played by Brittany Murphy. Another problem is the tremendous slow pace, as if the director wanted to "fill the sausage" just to get a movie lasting more than an hour. Combine that with the predictability I've mentioned and you'll understand that it turns out to be boring most of the time. As for the cast, Brittany Murphy does not surprise me or show great interpretive ability (she was never close to being a great actress and the tabloid news about her death can be more interesting than her filmography), Birch complied with which was required of her, but didn't particularly shine. It's not worth talking about Marc Blucas, who played a papier-mâché villain.

Mmm, a nervy girl with mental problems and on medication, decides on a whim, on hearing that the psychotic ex who's been stalking her has just been released from jail, that the best course of action would be to isolate herself in a huge, spooky, remote house without any transport. The premise alone is illogical enough to make most viewers put this back on the shelf.But my excuse is that it was on Five in the afternoon and, once I'd elected to give it a go, it was too hilarious to stop watching.The pace of the film verges on the glacial. Brittany Murphy, looking wan and pretty and rather like a ghost herself, wanders around in some sexier equivalent to pyjamas, wondering how she got herself into this nonsense. It starts to seem like nobody in the whole world ever moved so slowly. I can hear the director instructing her, 'Walk into the room slowly', then urging, 'No, Brittany, slower! Slower!' She sits in a tub and gazes mournfully off to one side. For hours.It's another one of those films that's predicated on the notion that a previous occupant felt the necessity to video every single thing that ever happened to them and that Brittany's character, rather than finding this nauseatingly narcissistic and tediously self-absorbed, would be sufficiently intrigued to watch all this footage back.Oh, I forgot to mention that she's a writer of some kind (people who stay in old, spooky houses generally are) and supposedly working to a deadline, not that you would know it. I think this may have been for some time in the next millennium.If your idea of horror is a few creaky doors and some very weak light fittings, you possibly might find yourself ever so slightly unnerved for a nanosecond. Otherwise, be prepared to find this a scream for all the wrong reasons.

Deadline is written and directed by Sean McConville. It stars Brittany Murphy, Thora Birch and Marc Blucas. Music is by Carlos José Alvarez and cinematography by Ross Richardson.Recovering from a psychological breakdown and required to finish a screenplay for a deadline, writer Alice Evans (Murphy) retreats to a remote Victorian house. Once there, though, mysterious goings on begin to accompany her. Undetered, Alice begins to unravel the terrible secrets of the house. But at what cost?One of the last films made by Brittany Murphy before her sad and untimely death, Deadline (poor title) is mostly friendless in the world of the haunted house sub-genre. Yet in spite of its flaws and tired old set up of premise, it's hardly one of the worst of its kind. It's all very low key and thriving on moody mystery atmosphere, both things which are aided by better than average music scoring and photography. Performances by the cast, in what is purely a six character piece, are very committed, managing to make the thin script more palatable. There's a couple of jolts placed within, while the scenes involving Birch and a clearly unhinged Blucas are genuinely creepy.Its reputation tells us that it's just too low key for some, and for sure it brings nothing new at all to a well populated formula. While the outcome is infuriating and has proved to be unforgivable for many a sub-genre fan. But with expectations set at low this rounds out as a decent enough time filler for those who like atmosphere laden haunted house pictures. 6/10

I just watched this horrid film 2 days ago. At no point did I think this was in any way good. The only reason I suffered/survived the whole thing was that I was trying to see if maybe it was one of those slow at first and then gets good movies. I was wrong. I spent the last two days trying to figure this movie out. The way it ended, it all made NO sense to me. Then as I was reading other reviews to see if anyone felt the same, or if someone had understood it and explained. Thankfully, someone did explain it. Sort of. It was more of a 'theory', but I'll go with it, since it made sense to me after I thought about it. Basically, Alice goes to the supposed creepy house to finish a screenplay, her 'girlfriend' drops her off and then leaves. Alice starts seeing/hearing weird things in the house. Alice finds a box of tapes and starts watching them. Uses them to write her screenplay. Witnesses a murder on it. Turns out a lot of what we saw, happened in her head. She was reliving repressed events. After, unfortunately remembering the movie, Alice called Rebecca at one point and asked her to look up information on David and Lucy. At the end, when Alice calls Rebecca again to tell her that David is in the house, Rebecca has no idea what Alice is talking about and says "I haven't talked to you in over a week, I've been worried about you." And that leads me to believe that the conversation with Ben didn't happen. For one, if Rebecca hadnt heard from Alice all week, she didn't really tell Alice that Ben was out of jail. Which lead me to believe that Ben isn't really out of jail... And he couldn't have possibly known where Alice is, nor could he have gotten her number.From what I gathered, Lucy=Rebecca, Alice=David... and Ben seems pretty unimportant...but maybe he plays Davids mom or the one that 'David' thought 'Lucy' was cheating on him with? Who knows.. If you notice, at the beginning of the movie, when they're in the car, Alice has the video camera and is recording Rebecca. At the end of the movie, Rebecca goes downstairs to look for David, she finds only the video camera on the floor and on the tape she sees herself on a bed, just like when Alice first found the tapes and it showed Lucy on the bed and David recording her. There was so much and nothing at all going on in this movie at the same time.