Elsewhere (DVD / Blu-ray)
Steve Barton
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Reviewed by Uncle Creepy
Starring Anna Kendrick, Paul Wesley, Jeff Phillips, Shannon Holt, Tania Raymonde
Directed by Nathan Hope
Distributed by E1 Entertainment
Elsewhere opens by asking the viewer if they’ve ever had a secret that they couldn’t live with keeping. Immediately my eyes began to roll, and they just did not stop. Strap in, kids; it’s time once again for your old Uncle Creepy to be your bad movie martyr.
Sarah (Kendrick) and Jillian (Raymonde) are best friends stuck in a nowhere town with seemingly no way out. Everything is cookie-cutter and stamped out. Jillian, the bad girl of our duo, decides to post semi-nude pics of herself on a MySpace-like site to attract some exciting new guys, and guess what? She finds one! Known only as Mister X (I shit you not), this dude sweeps our naive pretty right off of her cyber-feet — never to be seen again. From there it’s up to Sarah and her nerdy side-kick to unravel the mystery presented before them while inadvertently uncovering their town’s little secret.
If this all sounds very after-school-special-ish, it’s because that it is. Everything from Elsewhere‘s horrendous dialogue to its cautionary premise is ripped straight from the pages of any generic young-adult oriented horror paperback that can be found lying dusty and yellowed on the shelf of book stores everywhere.
Despite the aforementioned issues and the atrocious pacing (Whose idea was it to have the flick clock in at fifteen minutes shy of a full two hours? At ninety minutes it still would have been too long), the film’s cast still manages to make the most of this mess (especially Raymonde, whom “Lost” fans will recognize as Alex), and that’s the only thing that kept me watching. It’s obvious that director Nathan Hope tried to deliver something memorable with Elsewhere, but the flick never even gets a chance to build up high enough to fall apart. Boring. Tedious. Predictable. All those words apply as an accurate description of this ridiculously slow vanilla thriller.
The movie is available on both DVD and Blu-ray, and with the exception of the picture and sound quality, the packages are identical. We get a dry commentary from Hope and producer Vincent Palomino, a handful of deleted scenes, a generic making-of, and of course a photo gallery so that you can relive the tedium one still at a time.
The one thing I will say for this film is that it’s aptly titled. Throughout the entire viewing experience all I could do was wish that I was elsewhere. Skip it. Avoid it. Shun it. I ain’t kidding, folks. This movie sucks.
Special Features
1 1/2 out of 5
Special Features:
2 out of 5
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