on THE INVITATION

I caught a horror movie tonight and it was terrible.

My biggest problem with The Invitation is that it drops so many hints as to what its big twist is, especially if you have a passing knowledge of Dracula, that you’re left to sit there, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the main character to figure it out. There are few things more frustrating in a movie with some kind of a mystery element than when the audience figures out the mystery before the main character, and we have to sit there and wait for them to finally come around to where we were thirty minutes ago.

The other big problem with the movie is that the main character doesn’t take thirty more minutes than the audience to figure it out; she takes AN HOUR AND A HALF!

Sure, it’s very likely that many people will not be aficionados or even possess a causal familiarity with Bram Stoker’s work. In that case, they will be completely oblivious to something like New “Carfax Abbey” but even then, even if you don’t have that one missing piece that lets you know what KIND of monster we’re dealing with, it’s obvious from the first act that there is some kind of a monster and that the people in the house are not only aware of it but are fine with it. The only one who doesn’t know is the heroine, and so we’re forced to spend 90 minutes while she goes through the cliched tropes of a romantic story, without any charm, humor, or twists on those conventions to keep us entertained along the way.

By the time the big reveal happens — surprise, it’s Dracula and a house full of vampires! — the audience who knows the source material probably has long-since checked out, and the audience who didn’t know probably gave up caring long ago. I’m not even going to get into every single aspect of this movie’s marketing, as everything from the trailer to the poster all but screams “Dracula movie!” thus negating the need for an hour-and-a-half mystery and hurting the film every minute of its runtime.

Bad Sony. Bad.

3/10