After unknowingly littering on mystical land, five teenagers must reverse a curse to avoid being killed by the personification of Mother Nature.
I’m afraid this just didn’t do it for me. The concept isn’t fatally flawed, but the execution needs work.
As written, it’s little more than a 70’s slasher film with a handful of jokes and a little influence from The Ring or something like that. If it’s going to be a horror comedy, it needs to be funnier. I found exactly three things to be funny:
A political joke
A penis joke (but then, it’s hard to mess one of these up)
A self-deprecated sex joke near the end that was frankly endearing
That’s it. And this is a 120-minute screenplay, not a 90-minute comedy. Some of the characters are meant to be comically pathetic and absurd, but on each page the story can’t decide whether to play them straight or for laughs and accomplishes neither.
The pacing needs a boost as well. The opening prologue with younger versions of the main characters just crawls, and the pace doesn’t pick up once that’s over. If you can hang in there for a good 20 pages, it at least becomes readable, but it doesn’t really get going until nearly 90 minutes in.
The antagonist isn’t ever really explained. Her strengths and weaknesses are revealed to us as the action unfolds, which is satisfying and some of the best parts of this story. That also sets up a twist ending, which is less satisfying than it could have been.
All of the characters could use more development. This genre doesn’t require character arcs that rival the great dramas, but it requires more than the flat characters presented to us. We have two who are so pathetic that the only questions are whether the story will subvert the usual trope and let them live, and if it doesn’t, just when in the timeline will they get theirs?
We have another three who seem to be little more than filler. They don’t seem to change much at all over the course of the story, and only a couple of the story’s several plot points seem to involve them. Do they live? Die? Do we care?
Of the last two, one is simply absent from the long buildup to the action scenes. Introverted and quiet doesn’t not mean completely withdrawn from life, yet that is how he is portrayed.
Without giving too much of it away, the plot takes a minor faux pas by a child and turns it into life and death for an entire group. The in-world logic for this is not presented, rather it really is as simple as “if X, then Y”. The whole setup flies entirely too far under the radar. If a situation like this existed in real life, it would be treated as the psychic version of a Superfund site.
At the end, there is a twist ending, and such things are fine in horror films. Carrie comes to mind, and so does Planet of the Apes. But this twist is neither funny nor thought provoking. It dramatically darkens the tone of the entire story. When I try to analyze it, it either comes across as preachy or pointless, and that’s not a good way for a twist to land. Compare to say, The Shining. The horror presented by the Overlook Hotel persists yet doesn’t demand that we all change our lifestyles to avoid it. Perhaps that sort of ending would have worked better here as well.