It's hard not to glean the critique of a film when the title is so self explanatory. Thus is The Disappointments Room, a film which played for a week at my local theater & quickly disappeared. The usually reliable of late DJ Caruso manned this tired tale of gentrified investment in the country only for the otherworldly to have a say about it. These types of films are so hard to do, it amazes me how many are attempted. Kate Beckinsale & her husband (who looks like a cross between Robert Carradine & Andrew Garfield) w/cute moppet in tow engage in the usual 'get out!' shenanigans until the eye rolling conclusion wherein the real horror is the theft of time this scareless flick has perpetuated on me.

When naming your film I would not use and adjective like poor, bad or say disappointment because unless it is really good can come back to bite you. This film uses Disappointments Room and it was very disappointing. I thought it may be interesting, but boy I was completely wrong. Just very poor pacing and editing in this thing. There were times multiple things were happening and I had no idea what was going on. The father was making dinner with two guests while the wife was looking at the hired hand doing something and then this and that happened and I was wondering what the point of this and that was. It was an okay concept and could have worked, but the execution could not have been any more horrid, who the heck do they have writing the scripts to these things? I will say that the film at least looked good and though it was not by a major studio the film at least looked like it was a big Hollywood studio film.The story has an architect and her husband and son moving into a house that is in pretty rough shape. A very big house, because everyone in real life finds the most broken down looking house they can to move into even though banks kind of frown upon that as do inspectors. Well, the architect has something on her mind as something very predictable has occurred and now strange things are happening in her new house and she soon discovers a strange room not in the blueprints and immediately finds a key and gets told what it is with almost no build up. Soon she is visited by a handyman who seems to serve absolutely no purpose in the film and thankfully the film is over really quickly.The film just has so many problems. The story is atrocious, how do you make a movie about a room and then make the discovery and getting into the room so anticlimactic? I was expecting the film to progress to an ending that had the main character finally getting into the room to discover a horror like no other. Another problem is the annoying son and father and the pointless handyman that kept flirting and in the end served no purpose. Neither did the one old lady at the library, there is literally a junction where she is looking at old clippings about ghost killing people and then trying to call the architect, but then poof, she is gone too.This film is a horror film that features ghosts, a haunted house and no payoff. The movie kind of just ends, though they do the obligatory look back and see the ghost standing at the window scene. I can see why this film bombed which is truly pathetic considering it only cost 15 million to make! The actors range from disinterested (Kate) to completely overacting and annoying (everyone else, especially that father). There are a couple of jump scares and a couple of nice gore shots, but overall, this film is a big disappointment.

I enjoy scary movies. One of my favorite styles no matter what time of year. So why would I not watch this one! Name brand actors and all. The movie just didn't add up. It felt like it was getting somewhere and left SO much clearly out. Here are some examples. The son saw the little girl..... or at least that is what they led us to believe and its never mentioned again. The pool boy was killed.... or was he? We will NEVER know. The grave was dug up..... maybe....The librarian tried to call.... once to warn them. Good for her..... oh... and what was she going to tell them exactly? How was that dinner with their friends? Seriously... WTF happened? This was a very choppy pieced together movie. Its like the pages of a book fell out all over the place, they were taped back in.... except of course 3 pages of each chapter, those were just left out due to space.

What a bizarre movie 'The Disapointments Room' is. In fact it is so bizarre that I had to go and watch the trailer after seeing the film, because I couldn't imagine how they could possibly have marketed this. As I suspected, they portrayed it as basically pure horror. That isn't really the case however when you see the full length film. What is it then you might ask? I really don't know. I suspect they were going for a sort of a 'The Babadook' type thing where everything that happens is symbolic of something else (in this case depression). Now they were either too subtle with this concept, or they simply didn't know how to go about it properly. Hence, the finished product just ends up looking like a mess of a film that had no idea what it wanted to be.I notice the trailer states that this is "Based on actual events". I didn't see this show up in the beginning of the actual film, but it is possible I missed it. What's strange though is that I can't imagine what part of this could be based on actual events - or I suppose more to the point, which part of it couldn't. What I mean by that is nothing that happens is this film is both possible and incredible. The ghost side of things is obviously complete crap simply put there so that this could be called a horror movie, and the rest is just run of the mill story lines that have featured in movies thousands of times and happened in real life billions of times. 'True stories" are usually an expedition up Mount Everest that went wrong, or a ship that sunk on its maiden voyage. Just a a very odd claim that one.The film is riddled with negative elements. First of all, it's incredibly boring. There isn't even an opening scene of any note to kick things off and get the audience on the hook. There is one decent scare near the start, but not once after that did anything work in the least bit in terms of giving the viewers a fright or even creating any tension. Secondly, the amount of dream sequences and things shown that are not actually happening at all is bordering on ridiculous. Just time and time again, and you could even predict that this was the case while it was happening because it was so frequent. This is a real pet-peeve of mine, and this was one of the worst cases of it I've ever seen.When you have the word 'Disapointments' in your movie title you better make sure it is a high quality film, otherwise the critics are going to have a field day. Sadly, 'The Disappointments Room' didn't get the memo on that one. There's very little to like here. Certainly not one to rush out and see.