I have mixed feelings about The Black Waters Of Echo's Pond (2009). I had been wanting to see this movie for a while now. As soon as I heard a description of it, the first thing that popped into my head was a horror version of Jumanji. The plot concerns a group of young people enjoying a getaway on a remote island who discover an old board game that causes their darkest secrets and fears to be revealed. It sounds like a pretty awesome plot device, and it is. The board game itself looks very badass and some of the effects in the film are quite cool, I just felt that they could have done more with such an interesting concept. My only gripe with this movie is that it suffers from what I like to refer to as "High Tension Syndrome", though I could just as easily call it "The Descent Syndrome". It's what happens when a movie doesn't have enough confidence in it's storytelling or just doesn't know how to end and throws in a pointless and often times completely nonsensical scare mere seconds before the credits roll. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I believe I will henceforth refer to this phenomenon as "Deadly Friend Syndrome" because that movie has what has got to be my favorite completely random ending:
Don't worry, I didn't ruin anything for you. It makes even less sense if you've actually watched the movie. But anyways, I was completely with The Black Waters Of Echo's Pond until mere moments before the credits rolled. It's like the twist was that the director secretly hated me the whole time. Other than that though, I thought the movie was pretty good. Danielle Harris is good as always and Robert Patrick was very effective as the surly groundskeeper. I don't believe this film has actually been released officially yet, as the copy I saw was taped off of TV and the audio and video were very poor. It's a shame too, because I'd like to give this film another shot when it looks and sounds better. 7 out of 12 beers.
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