The film builds up the background with newspaper clippings during the opening. Downers Grove, a small town in Illinois, built its high school on sacred Indian ground and we know that is never good. Every year one senior dies before graduation. Curse or BS? The film centers on senior Chrissy (Bella Heathcote) who believes she is the next one. She has been having strange dreams and feelings. Her mom (Helen Slater) leaves for a week with her boyfriend, leaving Chrissie and her brother David (Martin Spanjers) home alone with less than a week to go.Chrissy manages to make a friend with Bobby (Lucas Till) a "grease monkey" and enemies with Chuck, a rival school quarterback (Kevin Zegers). Chrissy, feeling she is cursed, decides if she is going to go, she is going to do it "walking tall." It was then capped by a bad "B" ending for a half decent film.Guide: F-bomb. Sex. No nudity.

It seems as if you will be watching a suspenseful horror film. Sadly, you will be mistaken.While I would watch a movie about rape-and-revenge, I would prefer it if it was made obvious in the description, instead of some nonsense about a curse.I expected some weird coming across a graveyard or some Indian burial ground stuff (that they mention at the beginning, by the way), with some vengeance being taken out and her friends picked off.Well, the last part was vaguely true.I'm sorry, but this is the biggest example of false advertising I have seen since 'Bridge to Terabithia' (2007). Was there more than one writer, in separate rooms, doing this and hoping the other person would come up with a similar premise? It seems like that.As stated above, I like the idea of a teenage girl deciding to get revenge on the lustful, vain jock who tried to rape her. But I don't appreciate disguising it as a horror movie.The ending is just so bizarre and out of the blue that I can't wrap my head around it. It made even less sense than ever at this point.Let me summarize by saying that if the movie had been truthful from the start, I would have given it about 5 stars. I would have preferred a story about a teenage girl escaping a curse, but the only horror is how you feel when you realize what the story really is.

In many ways, this is the kind of horror movie that Wes Craven's "Scream" was supposed to put on notice, making the case that you can't get away with stupid, thinly drawn, overly sexualized adolescent characters who seem not to have a clue about anything around them. I guess no one told director/co-writer Derick Martini or co-writer Bret Easton Ellis how ridiculous making such a clueless film would be in 2015. Not that the film itself would have been any better in 1989, but the act of creating it wouldn't have seemed so inane.There is, at least, an intriguing premise -- that the curse of Downer's Grove is the death of one graduating high school senior each year. Exploring whether the curse is real, in horror movie terms, might have been interesting, or whether it is connected to some kind of revenge of the natives who once occupied the land. This is hinted at but never explored. But this film is too scattered to do that, instead dropping vague references to drug problems (never really explored or taken seriously) and thwarted ambitions of abusive fathers (never really explored or taken seriously). Everything and every character here is a cliché. It would be one thing if they started out as clichés and developed into characters we might care about, but they don't develop at all. It is perhaps unfair to criticize the performers because, really, what could they do with this junk?, but they are mostly pretty bad. Some of those whose work I'm a little familiar with, like Kevin Zegers, Lucas Till and Tom Arnold, have been much better elsewhere, so I'm prepared to believe that most of the rest can be better than their work here would indicate. Hopefully, this will be a resume low-light for them, rather than a career suicide. But if the pedestrian direction in any indication, Martini himself shouldn't get many more chances to badly mishandle any material at all.

"The Curse of Downer's Point" falls just short of being ridiculous. Ever watched a movie where NOTHING looked authentic or seemed real? This is a good example of such. It seems Downer's Point High School has a "curse." Every graduating class since before time has to deal with a death of a senior. Of course, all these deaths can be explained, so those involved with this mess lost any kind of paranormal connection right away. One guy who is high on meth decides to climb to local water tower and falls. There are drownings, drug overdoses, automobile accidents, etc. One senior (Chrissy) tries to downplay the curse, but no one will listen. She and her friend (who apparently will sleep with ANYONE) decides to attend a party in a neighboring town and it's all downhill from there.The viewer would think in all that you'd find a halfway decent movie. You'd be terribly wrong. Any of you who have read any of my reviews know one of the first things I'll go after is a script--or lack thereof. Whoever wrote this must have been doing Yeagerbombs AND bong hits because after Chrissy gives her reasons for not believing in the curse, the movie becomes one big old mess, e.g. there is an attempted rape that (when reported) is completely ignored by the police because the perpetrator is supposedly some football jock. Chrissy's brother is attacked by him and his goons and suffers a broken hand at their doing. The police do nothing. The only "curse" for this movie was its complete, mind-numbingly bad script. Rated "R" for attempted rape, sexual situations, and violence.