"HER CRY" FAILS TO IMPRESS...AT ALL

Houston has had it's long-ass-list of Indie film flops, many of which I wouldn't even dare review on this blog to contaminate your lives, and unfortunately this mega-mega flop is right down there with them. 

HER CRY [(2013) from Dark Lightning Films] is no doubt another slap in the face to real filmmakers in the local area. This hour long schlep of crap won a couple of awards, one being a Houston REMI for best "mystery" and "thriller"... REMI's are the prime example of "participation awards" given to anyone who submits a home video as an indie film.

Directed by Damir Catic, HER CRY tries to tell the Urban Legend of La LLorona, a Mexican story concerning a female spirit who appears during rain storms and thunder claps and tries to drown people who hear her cries out in the wind. The story is brought out through "found footage" and is not brilliant in it's adaptation of the legend, nor in it's screenplay. This is definitely a "hold a camera in you hand" type of film; don't expect anything else out of it.

I'm not sure what it is about having shaky camera footage and bad sound dubbing that was supposed to make this amateur film scary, but I wasted a little over an hour of my life [89 minutes] just trying to get through to the end credits. The acting is atrocious and definitely not what I expected to see from one of Houston's "brightest award winners" for that year...or any other year for that matter.

The absolute worst part of this film was the lighting; many segments just in the opening scenes which were poorly shot on camera without any attempt at bringing light to scene...a dire attempt to use darkness as a scary tool, I'm sure. There was use of an infrared night camera [of sorts] for some shots, but the techniques used with it were very poor and not thought out well at all. Some child actors were brought into the film who seemed to have no training or concept of working on film, seemed to give the film an amateur feel that brought no charisma to any scene at any time. These big failures make me wonder who accepts a film for preview by the awards team in Houston.

Again, the blame for this crap film goes directly to the production staff and it's director. Editing was inconsistent and the sound jumped from static to clear sound; to muffling; to garbling; leaving me with the impression that two to three people were involved in the final editing, and just trying to put something together to complete a film.

In the end, the film had a clever idea in a story but it was delivered with an overall feel of "an awkward kindergarten play that deserved an award for participating in a localized event where the production team were lucky that all of the actors just happened to showed up at the last minute."

I would honestly warn you not to waste your time on this little indie "train that couldn't." If you decide to want to watch it, you'll have to pay to see it.

[2 of 5 Stars]

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