Just light your TV on fire.
The Curse of Sleeping Beauty is an interesting film in that it is quite obvious most folks involved had no idea what they were doing. The film oozes incompetence in almost every scene. Just going over the plot holes would take longer than my average review. It is weird that retelling fairytales is apparently as hard as splitting the atom.
In this new version we follow Thomas (Ethan Peck) who inherits a house from an unknown uncle. Thomas has been haunted by dreams of Rose/Sleeping Beauty (India Eisley), and learns that this new home is connected to a curse involving his dream. The story is pretty basic, and it probably could have worked if the acting wasn’t simply atrocious. Peck is incapable of acting. He shows no emotion, care, or anything in the entire film. Instead we get a monotone “I don’t give a shit” attitude throughout. His indifference made me not care. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t solely Peck’s fault. The side characters are likewise awful as the film descends into stupid slap-sticky ha-ha moments for no reason. The winner of worst actor I have seen in a movie in many years is Daniel (James Adam Lim) who crashes the already burning wreck. Seriously, the hammy and awful dialogue from these two characters should make anyone avoid any project the two are involved with.
The entire plot hinges on the sheer stupidity of the characters, and oddly the stupidity of the viewer. The film has no respect for you, and assumes that you will enjoy this hokey, spoon-fed, and predictable tale because reasons. I actually think the film ran out of steam with only about 40 minutes filmed, so they ran back and shoved in a bunch of stupid exposition to pad it out. My wife argued that the script seemed like it was written by high schoolers, I disagree, I think high schoolers can be bright—a quality the writers of this lacks.
However, there is one thing that is quite well done in this film. The makeup and costume design of Rose is excellent. The dream sequences are beautiful—granted Peck’s dumfounded and stilted presence does hurt them, but otherwise these are a high point of the film. It is almost like a separate crew built these sets and designs only to have the director come in and have his poorly written characters take a big shit all over everything.
The film is a boring waste of time. I hated the characters and while the makeup was great, everything else is terrible. Google the cool images and save yourself this abysmal mess of a film. 2/10.
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