The Boy (2016) 1h 37m

I'm not sure about you, but any time I dare to enter a Wal-Mart I head straight to the DVD section just to check out the cheap shit.  Over the last six months or so I've seen copies of today's movie staring at me from the shelves.  I hadn't heard of it, never even bothered to pick it up and read the back, but I still felt strangely drawn to it.  Luckily it has shown up on Netflix recently and the dice were on my side when I rolled.

The Boy starts with Gretta, a woman attempting to put her life together after an abusive relationship.  She takes a short-term yet high paying nanny position away from home.  Upon arrival to the grand estate, Gretta is greeted by the parents and a life size porcelain doll, their son, Brahms.  Given a strict schedule to follow, our nanny is expected to wake up, dress, feed, and provide lessons to the doll while the parents are away on holiday.  Gretta instantly chalks this up as insane and shirks her duties until strange things begin to happen in relation to Brahms.

I'm jumping right in and saying this film has one of the best reveals I've seen in a long time.  Through the course of this entire movie we are left wondering if the doll is haunted.  Hearing disembodied footsteps, a child's voice, shadows moving under closed doors, and the doll ending up in places where it was not left.  So when the explanation comes blasting out of nowhere I popped hard for it.  One of the hypest moments I've had watching a recent horror film.

Alas, I do have a complaint, and that is that despite this amazing moment, I'm left the same way I felt after watching High Tension.  Now that I know where the rabbit hole goes, I have no reason to go back and watch this again on my own.  It was still a great movie, but ignorance is bliss when it comes to these types of horror films.  You want to be scared by the unknown.  Think of how boring Scooby Doo would be if Velma just walked up to the person from the start and said "It's this scumbag!"

I give The Boy 3.5 supposedly haunted dolls out of 5:

Oculus (2013) 1h 44m

I can't remember if I mentioned this on here before, but I used to have an irrational fear of mirrors growing up.  Mostly it was mirrors while in a dark room.  The entire concept of the "Bloody Mary" game was terrifying to me.  Now kids do stupid shit for YouTube.  Back in the day you just went into the bathroom with friends and turned the lights out!

Oculus puts Karen Gillan (Amy Pond from Dr. Who) up against some sort of evil mirror.  While Karen was a child, this mirror lead to the death of their parents and her younger brother being arrested as the mentally disturbed cause of their father's death.  She tracked the mirror down just as her brother is being released and the two attempt to prove the mirror is cursed and destroy it.  The problem is that the mirror has the ability to bend reality around them so that they lose track of what is real and what isn't.

What do we do with a problem like Oculus?  I was engaged with the film for a good part of until they did one too many flashback scenes for story development.  The juxtaposition of current events mirroring the same actions our characters took as children was a nice touch, and even having the past and present overlap in the same scene would rekindle my interest.  Oculus just spends too much time telling us what we already know.  The attention to detail is unnecessary.  The mirror is evil, your parents went crazy, give us some shots of how the mirror does it and the extent of crazy, death, then deal with the mirror now.

I liked the reality bending that the mirror would do and the siblings' attempts to combat it took some interesting turns but it was just too safe.  You have something here that opens up to unlimited possibilities, and it pushes some comfort levels, but I feel like it only toes the line of what it could do.  I also don't have a good understanding of the mirror itself.  Is it haunted?  Why does this woman exist with it?  Who made it?  Did I miss these things during a bored moment?  Because that's poor storytelling then.  Step up your game spooky mirror movie!

I give Oculus 2 Bloody Mary Halloween decorations out of 5: