UnowPriceless
hyped garbage
Curapedi
I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
Jonah Abbott
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Michael Ledo
Nothing like an interesting story made uninteresting. Sarah Hope (Lily Rabe) as a child was the sole survivor of a cult suicide from 3/23/1985. Now as an adult she is returning to the secluded ranch (no bars, can't run to get help) with a camera crew who happen to be the larvae of the FBI men who raided the compound. Not to give away too much, but they locate some old film canisters (and 1 VHS) about the cult engaged in soul transmigration.The individual scenes were done okay, but when placed together it somehow didn't make for a great film. Raspberry Award winner Jessica Alba will be looking to add to that list as Maggie who played a deer in the headlights for most of the feature. Hey! Let's capture that look and put it on the DVD cover! The male lead needed someone other than Thomas Jane whose charisma seemed forced upon us. Brad Pitt would have been too expensive, but Billy Drago, or heck even Billy Zane.Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.
shalsea
This movie may not be the horror movie of the year but my high vote to this movie is only personal and i know it doesn't really deserve it. But my feelings towards this movie make me feel like i watched a great horror movie.First, Lily as Sarah Hope shows us a depressive and nicely disturbed young woman who finds the chance to get rid of her demons. While a crew is leading her to the place she needs to be as she leads them to answers about what happened, it's certain that it is unlikely to feel pity for the characters. They are not developed enough, even Jessica's character who seems to be a ghost in the movie sometimes.But what did work on me with this movie is the shabby and grunge atmosphere, hard to find in almost all the horror movies. Also the story behind what would have happened for real with this cult is far from being boring, and i was seeking for flashbacks all along.If it had been creepier - because we want more - and if the characters had been more developed, this could have been the horror movies we've been waiting for.
Modern Monsters
A grim answer to the question "What the heck happened to Jessica Alba?", The Veil starts with a blasphemous mass and ends with a crucifixion. Heavily relying on the Jim Jones' mass suicide with just a dash of the Manson family, it mixes classic cinematography with post-modern seasoning, found footage (please Lord, make it STOP!) and an unreliable narrator. Mix the whole in a Cabin in the Woods environment (after carefully expunging all said movie's cleverness and voilà, here's your bad movie of the week. You watch what is filmed of the characters; you watch what the characters film; you also watch a lot of the characters watching the movie they found. Call it meta if you wish. One calls it crap.Sarah Hope, natch (Lili Rabe, of American Horror Story's fame, here given absolutely nothing to do) is the sole survivor of Heaven's Veil, a cult led by Jim Jacobs (Tomas Jane, hamming it up as if the world was really about to end). Maggie Price, natch (Jessica Alba) wants to shoot a documentary on the massacre, because her father, an FBI agent, committed suicide after such an horror happened on his watch. She has a crew, which bears no importance whatsoever since they will all die anyway. OK. Let's share a moment of non-nonsense approach now, shall we?So: jump scares (at least 6), rocking chair, moth, whispering ghosts, scary doll, spiritualism seance, demonic mumbo-jumbo, torch lights running out of battery, no cellphone coverage. All checked. Everything that could possibly go wrong does so from the start, but the characters are real troopers, so they carry on. Also, they are dumb as dumb can be. Wait a minute, no cymbal-crashing monkey?For some reason, there is ONE videotape, labeled "Experiment 23", and it's shitty as hell, but all the rest is shot in glorious Super 8 Cinemascope, immaculately edited, of course. What Experiment 23 shows makes no sense whatsoever to what will follow, but they all get hooked on it like a 20$ hooker on her first crack pipe. "We need to watch the rest of these films", someone says. NOOOOOO! RUUUUUUN!Not to spoil much, but Jim Jacobs aims at retrieving the three nails of the Cross to acquire eternal life, a project absolutely as legit as ruling the world via the creation of a social network or creating new California property development land through an earthquake. Jesus was nailed to the Cross, so the spirit is nailed to the body, you know. Of course you do.Embarrassed by so many references it would be pedantic and tedious to list them, movie pedestrianly proceeds to its bitter end. FBI has ESP. Sarah is not what she seems to be. Jessica Alba gets immortal the hard way. Now let's all have a quizz: why is that thing called The Veil? Oh, rutabaga.
TheBarleyGuy
Take a deep breath, surprisingly this is NOT a found footage movie. With that said, I almost wish that it was. What it is, instead, is a combination of found footage elements and traditional narrative film making. Here's the problem: the two do not mix well, and create a bit of a mess. I understand the desire to combine the two, but it just doesn't work, and you get a movie like The Veil.Perhaps the most bizarre part of the movie are the writer and director. Phil Joanou helmed the piece, and this is the man responsible for that Punisher short that everyone liked, the Dwanye Johnson vehicle Gridiron Gang, and 3 U2 documentaries, while the script was penned by Robert Ben Garant, who wrote Hell Baby, and A Night At The Museum 2 when he wasn't starring in Reno 911. These forces came together to make an ultimately bland mess of a horror film.The movie stars Jessica Alba (Sin City), Thomas Jane (The Punisher), and Lily Rabe (American Horror Story) along with a lovable cast of dead-meat characters, as they head to the site of what is basically Jonestown (without calling it Jonestown). Once they are here, a weird mixture of horror clichés, jump scares, and lazy tropes lead to their deaths. Spoiler alert, I guess. The performances are fine, everyone brings about as much as they can to this particular script, but all in all the "star power" on show here isn't enough to save it.The main story, of Alba and her team headed back to the site of the massacre, is edited to be dark, high contrast, however the rest of the film isn't edited to match that. At one point, when looking at photos taken of their campsite, the photos are clearly of the real environment and they clash massively with the look of the film. I understand stylistic choices of editing, and wouldn't even begrudge them that if it all matched up. However, they different parts of the film clash so much that it almost feels like two movies crammed together, cobbled together with fair-ground haunted house level scares.The scary moments have no cohesion, they simply exist to give you a jolt and to make you feel like this movie is scary, which it really isn't. The movie also includes a lot of "watching the tapes we found in the spooky house", and those really don't worth either. It seems like The Veil can't decide what movie it wants to be, and that really hurts it more than anything else.All in all this really doesn't work. The story is a mess and flies all over the place, and it feels more like a "Yeah whatever, bro, let's make a scary movie. People will eat up any old s**t in that genre", than anything else. I really hope 2016 picks up from here, but it's hard to feel too optimistic.
