
[Second Coming]
Plot:Ashley and Lora have always had a special connection. Whatever one was feeling the other would as well. Now that they are older and living separate lives, Lora is shocked by dark visions she receives from her sister. A sister who's been murdered. Lora must go back to her hometown to solve the mystery of her sister's death but there are no tangible clues and no body. How will Lora ever get revenge for her sister's murder?
Cast:Juliet Reeves,
Greg Thompson,
Adonis Stevens,
Marnee McClellan,
Kevin J. O'Neill,
Rita Manyettee.
My Thoughts:Lifetime Movie Of The Week!
Review:Oh how I loathe movies like "Second Coming". Films like this fit into a niche I like to call "Lifetime Horror". Lifetime Horror, is basically a horror film that is not scary enough to be deemed a true, blue, horror movie. Well, that is unless you're a 14 year old girl. But rather just scary enough to freak out teenyboppers, and people who watch The Lifetime Channel, Soccer Moms, etc. This film follows twin sisters Ashley and Lora.
They have the usual twin vibe going. When one feels pain, the other feels the same pain. Yeah, the twin thing is creepy on it's own, and if played up properly, it can really make a horror movie great. But in this films case, the twin elements are used to move forward a Lifetime Movie of the week plot. A plot which involves.....a small town christian man cheating on his wife with a teen-aged girl, and then killing and disposing of the corpse of the young girl!
Gasp! Shocking! Haven't we seen this before in like....real life? How many of these sordid affairs have to make an appearance in horror films? Yes, we know men are dogs, and they philander around on their wives when they start getting older and their hotness level decreases, blah, blah blah. This does not a horror movie make. At any rate, the girl who is killed is Ashley, and her sister Lora, who blew their smalltown existence to become a photographer in the big city a long time ago, begins receiving terrifying visions from her twin sister.
The visions soon become too much to bare, and so she decides to return back to their hometown to investigate her sisters disappearance. And thrown into all of this is the abused childhood subplot, where daddy was a mean-drunk-redneck who used to abuse his two daughters because they reminded him of their mom who apparently walked out on him. How original eh? But like I said, Lifetime channel material! I didn't know what was scarier about this film.
The fact that the writer actually believed what he was writing was genuinely scary, of the level of drama in the film. Honestly, I've never seen a more over-dramatic horror film in my entire life. This movie has it all, creepy visions, sordid affairs, christian hypocrisy, the bitchy wife, the angsty teen daughter, the small town life where everybody knows your name, and on, and on, and on. I didn't know whether to fall asleep, or to take an asprin for my splitting headache.
Either way, horror fans shouldn't look to this film for anything worthwhile. It holds no scares, no suspense, no entertainment value, no fun, no great scenes or sequences, no nothing. The movie is predictable, boring, and delivers nothing but melodrama, and more melodrama. I didn't know if I was watching a horror film, or an ABC Family Original Movie! I really wish filmmakers would stop trying to tone and water down horror for suburban teenagers.
This film felt less like something I'd watch on a lazy Saturday, and more like something the cast of "MTV's:The Hills" would watch on a lazy Saturday. The one silver lining to this all though, is the films ending, which for some reason, is the only thing the movie gets right. When you look at the ending unto itself, you just chuckle and wonder if the writer had put more effort into making what came before the final 5 minutes, as unpredictable as the final five minutes was, then the film wouldn't have sucked so bad.
But trust me, this movie sucked, big time. And when an 86 minute film, gives you 5 minutes of good cinema, that is not a good thing. "Second Coming" should've taken a lesson from it's own conclusion. Be creative, and refreshing. Instead, if followed the same patterns as many so called horror films before it, by appealing to soccer moms and mall shoppers, and forgetting that horror fans are just a little bit smarter than that.
Positives:The Final five minutes.
Negatives:Stale plot, too much drama for a horror movie, unscary, uninteresting, unentertaining, just flat out a poor effort all around.
Overall:Half a star out of four.
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