Let’s see what is under this rock.
Wonder Valley is a 2020 horror(?) film that plopped onto Prime with no announcement or any sort of press. (Granted, the film was made in 2017, but only released here this year). The film follows four girlfriends who descend into a hellish situation where what is reality and what is a hallucination isn’t clear.
I am not one to call a film pretentious (as I seem to like those films), but this one has its head so far up its own ass I’m surprised we can see anything on the screen. Shot on a handheld we get the swaying and blurry frames that are done to give the film a dreamlike structure. Some of the shots are nice, but if we cut out establishing shots with overbearing music, we’d cut the running time by about 30%. We also have too many shots in poor lighting to know what is going on.
Where the film falls flat is that the characters aren’t interesting nor likable. The whole 4 friends (friends=people who probably would not talk to each other in real life because they are all assholes) go on a trip and bad things happen isn’t new, and this film doesn’t add anything to it. These people are truly reprehensible, and it is hard to care about anything that happens to them.
Stop making horror films with terrible characters! Or, at least have someone the audience can maybe relate to? Look at Midsommar, we had complex and real characters instead of these stupid assholes.
Once the trip begins, things spiral fairly quickly, but it still somehow manages to be boring. I think they watched every independent horror and tried to take all the tricks. Weird noises? Check. Jump cuts? Check. Eerie music? Check. Shaky cam? Check. You name it and it has been crammed in here without any sort of overarching theme.
Ask yourself, how often do you go out on a long weekend with people you hate? I mean, they all clearly hate each other. Let’s add some hallucinogens to mix and see what happens! Oh also, be sure to act as miserable as possible at every moment to show how unique you are.
There’s simply nothing here. This is a void of filmmaking where I wouldn’t be surprised if this shit was just strung together as it was filmed. I can’t even make fun of this one because there is just nothing to grab onto.
If want to have a miserable evening that will do nothing to enlighten you give this one a go. Doing the dishes is funner.
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