Brainless backpacked twits with cameras make a b-line to enter a mysterious temple despite the known evil that awaits them. Using only a few cool looking visual effects and a few neat camera tricks, Temple is low grade nightmare fuel that should scare us all from ever toiling in these erratic and unneeded films about Japanese culture gone bad. The trope is old. The genre is dead. It's time to move on. Clowns. We need more movies about evil clowns........
From the writer of Blair Witch, You're Next and The Guest comes the next film that pits three (more) American tourists against an ancient Asian evil. Like another spin on The Ruins, Turistas or any other horror flick that pits dumb Caucasians against their own bad instincts, Temple is truly a needless exercise in putting viewers through a series of repetitive motions that do nothing new or fresh. Considering that this was written by the guy behind several of Adam Wingard's better than average cinematic releases, it's rather shocking that this has literally no value or redeeming qualities whatsoever. As a middle of the road, low budget straight to video flick, it's even hard to imagine how they thought this 78 minute feature was even worthy of a release in its current state. Plot points die. Mysteries are left open. And viewers scratch their head, wondering what happened.
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| I ate a mother f@#$%*! porcupine. |
With a confused script that never fully exercises an ounce of creativity or dynamic, Temple is just a routine project that squanders a mythology that could have been used on something better. What feels like it might reach some middling heights like last year's The Forest is wasted by an amateur director and actors that aren't given any room to stretch their legs. Temple uses no character development, offers no back story, and mangles the opening and ending sequences by trying to mix in some inane elements with cops trying to solve the deaths of the main characters. This movie is a literal mess that can't get out of its own way for a second.
If you're tired of me beating you over the head and want to further withstand more mental abuse, check out Temple, a movie so lazy they couldn't add 'The' to its title. After a weekend of Dario Argento films and other far greater indie horror flicks, this was an abysmal disappointment that has rendered my interest in these types of movies nil.
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Score
-CG