the leading man is my tpye

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A group of late twenty-something friends meet at a cabin for a long weekend of reliving old times. These boring friends talk and talk for hours about their personal baggage and who slept with whom almost to the point you forget you're watching a horror film, or are supposed to be. Eventually they play the "say Dead Mary in the mirror" game with a candle with the idea that the spirit of the dead witch will appear. Instead the spirit possesses one of them but no one including the audience who it is. Borrowing heavily from John Carpenter's "The Thing", minus the style and suspense, the characters start to distrust one another. This movie had potential to be a minor success but the lack of any action for such a long period of time sinks it fast. There is a few nice moments, like when the thing…I mean a character, reveals herself to another character in a shack in the woods. There isn't much gore to speak of and what little there is unconvincing. The unknown cast is good but the movie needed to shift gears and actually get scary for it to work and it just doesn't.

The attempt of the director to make a horror movie lies flat on the ground.The ghost or horror element appears only for 2 very short instant,in fact the poster is more horrifying than the movie.The central premise is so vague and ill-defined that it ends up making less sense as time goes on.In the movie it constantly needs to fade to black in order to jump from one character to another. For a film that supposedly takes place over the course of a night, this is not only unnecessary but serves to deflate the dramatic tension."Dead Mary" is a below mediocre movie. The urban legend of Bloody Mary that was brilliantly explored in "Candyman" in the 90's, now is used in a rip-off of "Evil Dead". There are many movies with "a group of friends that goes to a cabin in the woods and faces evil", like for example "Cabin Fever", which works. But "Dead Mary" is awful, with a boring beginning, a messy story where "Dead Mary" never shows up, and a ridiculous conclusion.This movie was a disappointment on several different levels. As we first start in it's obviously going to be yet another horror movie about beastly and possibly a couple of decent young people heading out to do stupid things in the woods and on that note it played through.

Dead Mary is set at an isolated log cabin situated deep in the woods. Couples Kim (Dominique Swain) & Matt (Jefferson Brown), Lilly (Maggie Castle) & Bryce (Steven McCarthy), Amber (Reagan Pasternak) & Dash (Michael Majeski) plus odd one out Eve (Marie-Josée Colburn) who is on her own have all been invited to the cabin for the weekend by their friend Ted. There they hang out &, well not much else really. Suddenly someone comes up with the bright idea of playing Dead Mary, a campfire tale that states if you say 'Dead Mary' three times into a mirror said deceased female named Mary, who was a Witch when she could be described as Alive Mary, will come back from the dead & kill everyone. No-one really takes it seriously but do it anyway, then by the nights end they begin to wish they hadn't as Matt turns up mutilated in the woods possessed by something evil...This American Canadian co-production was directed by Robert Wilson & one has to say I though Dead Mary is a rather odd little teen horror film & a not particularly good one either. The script for Dead Mary is credited to Peter Sheldrick & Christopher Warre Smets although according to the IMDb while it started out as a typical teen slasher with a ghostly Dead Mary zombie rising from the lake to kill various teens director Wilson decided to change everything & have some unseen unknown & unexplained evil force possess the teens one-by-one & thus turn it into some sort of modern teens in peril in the woods in a log cabin mix between The Evil Dead (1981) & the body-snatching plot of The Thing (1982) as the second half of Dead Mary plays out exactly the same as John Carpenter's masterpiece with it trying to create a real sense of paranoia & mistrust. To be brutally honest Dead Mary is a mess, the first thirty minutes are so boring it's untrue, after ten minutes & absolutely nothing had happened I was becoming bored, after fifteen minutes I was past bored, after twenty minutes of nothing happening I was praying for some sort of dramatic incident & by the twenty five minute mark & still literally nothing of any significance had happened I had all but given up on it. Upto this point the entire film has been nothing but really dull dialogue between really dull character's, nothing that happens has any relevance to later on anyway which makes it even worse. Eventually the film kicks into gear & the body stealing plot starts to develop, to be fair this part of the film is alright but with such a small cast of character's there's not much the makers could do with the idea, they also reveal who is an evil clone far too easily & it's annoying to see people keep splitting up all the time. Also anyone possessed by whatever is possessing them seems intent on upsetting people by telling them that their boy/girlfriend is cheating on them! It's just odd to see a mutilated Matt for instance just sit there & tell everyone that their lover is cheating on them for no apparent reason. The plot is a bit of a mess, there is no solid or reasonable explanation for anything that happens, the ending is one of those frustrating ones which just cuts to black at a really annoying moment & leaves everything up in the air & whatever happened to Ted anyway?Director Wilson does alright here actually, the film has a very laid back & lazy feel to it with slow camera moves, lingering shots & a pace that at times if it was any slower the film would be going backwards. The gore levels are none existent, there's a couple of dead bodies, a burnt arm & some blood splatter but this isn't much off a PG. I don't remember any nudity either. The film is well shot with a fair bit of style & I did like the atmosphere of the final twenty odd minutes with the dark woods & pouring rain.Technically the film is pretty impressive with nice cinematography, there's no quick 'blink & you'll miss it' editing or shaky hand held camcorder shots either. Dead Mary certainly looks nice, it's just a shame the script is a total mess from start to finish. Apparently shot in Ontario in Canada. The acting is pretty good, while not Oscar worthy no-one stands out as being particularly bad & the girls look rather nice which helps.Dead Mary is a really odd film, the first thirty minutes will put most into a coma while the rest of it is some odd mix of Candyman (1992) with the whole urban myth surrounding saying someone's name three times The Evil Dead & The Thing but doesn't come close to being as good as any of those. I can't really see who would get anything out of Dead Mary I really don't.

This was on demand on Showtime and I got my wife, sister & her husband to watch it on a fluke as a stupid, funny, hopefully slightly scary movie. We were all shocked to find we really liked it. Decent acting, fairly good plot and we really liked that you never really saw 'Mary'. The end was a little weak, but all in all we really liked it.I'd recommend it for a late night when there's not much else to watch... it may surprise you too.Definitely way better than we expected.Watch it.