The Legend of Bloody Mary
The Legend of Bloody Mary
R | 09 December 2008 (USA)
The Legend of Bloody Mary Trailers

Ryan has been plagued with nightmares since the night his sister Amy went missing 8 years earlier after playing the game "Bloody Mary." Amy had stumbled onto a website on the Internet (www.marked4mary.com) about a witch called Bloody Mary and a game to summon her evil spirit. Now a senior in college, Ryan is reaching a mental breaking point from the years of stress and guilt from his sisters disappearance. His girlfriend Rachel frustrated herself at Ryan's emotional distance and self pity, calls for help to a former professor of Ryan's, Father O'Neal. Father O'Neal is both a priest and a archaeologist who decides to help Ryan end his tormenting grief by using his detective skills and wit to figure out what exactly happened to Ryan's sister, and uncover the truth to the Legend of Bloody Mary

Reviews
GL84

Trying to overcome his constant nightmares, a man and his friends use the root cause of his sister's disappearance playing an urban legend and find the spectral being they summoned is connected to her and try to stop her rampage.Overall, this one is quite a missed opportunity that really doesn't get much right going. The fact that this one manages to really get invested in the back-story for the urban legend and tries to explain it does get some favors here with this settling on the wrongly-accused witch in colonial times as the subject matter, and the scene depicting this time are where it really starts getting good with the entire sequence played out as a mindless torture sequence really revealing in the gore and brutality inflicted upon her that starts this chain of events that it gets this off on a great note. Not only is this fully warranted for her wanting revenge, but the brutality alone is quite enjoyable, and while it's not in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the movie it still works quite well in delivering the gory goods. Beyond that, there's not a lot to really get invested with since the majority of the screen-time is taken with the duo tracking her down managing to investigate the sightings without really getting anything out of the film beyond those brief moments where the play-out of one of the investigations yields some rather tense images. By staying so focused on the investigation, there's not a lot of chances for the slasher to really be invested in this one and therefore it goes long periods of time without getting her on-screen or even involved with the goings-on in the story, and when it does happen it's usually in the form of long, unneeded showings of what happened to his sister years ago that sets off the whole search nowadays but doing so back-in-time, shuttling back-and-forth in the time-line so much it's hard to get a true handle on where you are it's done so much. This is the series of scenes that are supposed to sort out the thrills and suspense from her actions, but instead nothing all that interesting happens and the lengthy set-pieces for these scenes really undoes it all. Coupled with that lack of screen-time and this is a lot worse off than it really should be.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity.

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DrLex

The title of my review pretty much sums it up, but since I have to write at least 10 lines, here goes. You will not want to watch this movie if you want to see: 1.) fast pacing at any moment in the movie, 2.) fluent dialogue, 3.) smooth editing, 4.) good acting, 5.) suspenseful build-ups, 6.) more or less stable image that doesn't induce seasickness, 7.) good CGI.I also can't recommend this movie to people susceptible to claustrophobia, because half of the time the camera is pretty much shoved almost into the faces of the actors for no reason whatsoever. It gives the feel that everything was recorded in rooms barely large enough to hold both the actors and the filming crew.There are some scenes of people walking and driving cars, with no other apparent purpose than to lengthen the duration of the movie, even though the pacing is already sleep-inducing on its own. Some of these scenes are accompanied by music that feels out of place, unless you accept that this movie is geared towards a young teenage audience. These scenes look like a typical karaoke video but without the scrolling lyrics.The whole thing feels like separate parts which were just concatenated, without any attempt to get the pacing right. I'm not just talking about the different scenes, even within a single scene it's as if they recorded all the actors sequentially, making them say all their lines at once, and then interleaved these video streams. As a result, there are frequent unnatural and awkward pauses between sentences.And then there's the shaky cam, which is used at all the wrong moments. During a simple conversation between two characters, it's as if the camera man gets progressively more drunk and eventually is unable to track his subject even though it is sitting still in a chair.Even the sound has a low-budget quality to it. The clearly audible different background noises on the dialogue of actors in the same scene support my theory that each actor acted all their lines sequentially. They could at least have mixed some extra consistent background noise over the entire scene to mask this.My threshold for a movie that has something still making it worth watching is 5/10. I give this one a 3. There were some scenes that came remotely close to being scary, and the historical parts looked pretty good. But for the rest it felt like the filming project of a bunch of high school kids.

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michaeldouglas1

Like other posters, I've long regarded the Mary Worth legend as worthy of the cinema. But like it's predecessors, this movie can't cut it. Poor acting, poor CGI, incomprehensible screenplay, lousy camera work that tries so hard to be "artsy", but comes off as annoying.The plot jumps around so often from past to present that it really gets confusing. At least the 1600's scenes are recognizable as such, but the "modern" plot line is very hard to follow -- there's two subplots playing almost simultaneously: the "present day" scenes of the "hero", then scenes of the Mary Worth game that started all the unpleasantness several years earlier. The director volleys us back and forth faster than a tennis game. And the worst of it is that we get no real set-up of these characters; new people keep popping up without any explanation of who they are, and frankly, the actresses in both subplots are so uniformly forgettable that one can't help but get them mixed up! Then there are a couple strange musical interludes played over montages, which deflate any tension faster than the air going out of a tire. Was this a homage to cheap Seventies message films? We're treated to an excruciatingly dull scene in a café between the hero and the priest where they sit there staring at each other for five minutes, barely saying a word. Oh, and then we get some boring scenes of the priest driving around in his car. ZZZZZZZZZZ After all this muck, the climax of the film turns out to be very pedestrian, indeed. Mary Worth gets banished fairly easily for a spirit who's been making trouble for 300 years. But is she banished? Apparently not, because the director couldn't resist the usual "shocker" ending we've all come to expect in such schlock. Ho hum.Guess we moviegoers will have to wait a while longer to get a decent treatment of the Mary Worth legend.

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movieman_kev

Mary Worth (Caitlin Wachs from Thirteen Days and Air Bud 3) is a woman living in the 16th century, after she's accused of carrying Satan's child by her Puritan brethren and her face cut up horribly with shards of mirror, she haunts all the mirrors. In the present day, Ryan is having nightmares about his sister, while his professor/ priest is planning an archaeological dig up the remains of the same aforementioned Puritanical colony. We also get flashbacks to 2001 (when Amy, Ryan's sister went missing).I found this to be an endlessly talky, horribly acted, boring little horror film that, try as I may, I just couldn't get into. It's also full of idiotic dialog that threatened to make my eyes bleed and brain melt. Furthermore the supposed 'scares' are largely nonexistent. Mary Worth, more like Mary Worthless.Eye Candy: Irina Costa gets topless My Grade: D

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