Everyone involved in making The Secret Village did bad and they should feel bad. Very, very bad. If this movie is any indication, they feel nothing. Do you know that person that sucks the life out of a room the minute he or she walks in? The Secret Village is the cinematic version of that person.
Two characters named Greg and Rachel end up sharing a house and investigating something that is either mass hysteria or, possibly, witchcraft in a small town. A bunch of really stupid script writing happens, there’s some really bad editing decisions made, and someone’s idea of what makes something suspenseful gets taken out back and shot. That was the movie I saw.
There’s some attempt at creativity with…I don’t know…time, I guess. But it feels like someone tried extrapolating the idea of “shaky cam” to create something called “shaky time” and it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds.
Plot lines develop, almost. Then never go anywhere. Characters have no personality, no motivation, appear and disappear for no reason. And the soundtrack? I can’t even anything about the soundtrack.
Now, the movie the director/producer/actors/etc. wanted me to see is another story. What that story is, I cannot begin to comprehend based on what I saw and heard.
There are some bad mistakes that not even a rookie would make. Like placing a call with a cell phone and, instead of hearing the standard tone you’d hear from the earpiece, you hear the recipient’s ringtone. I’d expect something like that in something from the Scream franchise. But as a point of humor. Not as a serious moment in the movie. The characters cast as the “bad” guys, are so freaking inept at being threatening that it is almost humorous. But it’s not. It’s just apathetic.
My ability to enjoy a movie in the moment and not try to figure out the ending was completely thwarted by this movie. Being generous, I had it figure out in 30 minutes. And was sorely disappointed to be right.
If you could extract the the dullest parts of ennui, boredom, lethargy, and mediocrity and combine them into some new even more listless sensation, you would still have something more exciting than this movie.
You could give a six-year old child a film editing machine (don’t do that!) and access to Plan 9 From Outerspace, Birdemic, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. That kid would put together something more compelling than this movie. Hell, you could have the kid’s movie dubbed into Swahili and then have that translated and subtitled into Swedish and that would make more sense than The Secret Village.
At The Hoosies 