Brief Story Line
A young boy named Alex (Winslow Fegley - Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made etc) who loved to write scary stories, was feeling extremely down and decided to stop writing them. As he was running away from home, Alex was somehow captured by a witch later on revealed to be Natacha (Krysten Ritter - Jessica Jones TV series, She's Out of My League etc) who threatened to kill him unless he told a scary story every night.
While doing his best to write new stories to survive, Alex found there was another young girl who was also captured like him named Yazmin (Lydia Jewett). Despite a bumpy start in their early interaction, both of them formed a bond and decided to try to escape.
So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this movie.
End of Brief Story Line
When I saw the trailer of this film, I thought this looked like a bit of horror & scary even if the main cast were children. So I was a bit surprised when I noticed that Netflix categorize this for 7+ in the maturity rating. And as I watched the first few minutes, there were indeed a bit of scary images which I thought would not be suitable for kids. However, as I continued watching I found that it was not that scary, although I still think children might be disturbed by those scenes in the early part.
At first I felt the movie was a bit typical adventure of kids who had to fight against a villain. But as soon as Alex started to read his story, I realized this was a pretty unique film. As I looked forward to more of that story telling, it appeared the adventure was more focused and that interesting part was not frequently shown. This made me feel the movie did not have too much excitement, and not until the last 20 minutes or so that it became really exciting. Especially when it referred to a classic children's horror story plus having a quite satisfying climax.
I watched the closing credit in order to know more about the film and saw that it was based on the children's book of the same title written by J. A White. And I also saw a familiar name of Sam Raimi (creator of Evil Dead series, director of first Spider-man trilogy, Drag me to Hell and few others) as one of the producers. So he was quite experienced in dealing with horror story, although technically this one is more of a dark fantasy.
The cast here were generally ok. I admired the young Winslow Fegley as Alex, while Lydia Jewett was pretty decent as Yazmin. Krysten Ritter was fine too as the witch (there were few moments where she was quite convincing as evil witch). What I really liked was the special effects which were pretty good, especially for the creature and Lenore the cat. The film has a duration of 103 minutes which did not have any mid or post end credit scene.
Overall this was an OK dark fantasy horror movie based on children's book. It has quite unique story telling and looked like the critics quite enjoyed it. I myself found it to be entertaining in the final third and I also liked the story telling part. But it was not a truly memorable film that I would remember for a long time. So if you want to watch this kind of movie, you are welcome to give it a try. It's available on Netflix.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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