Solo (2013) Directed by Isaac Cravit

Just another run of the mill genre flick, involving a teenage girl (of course played by a 20+ year old) on a remote wooded island, where she gets haunted or hunted by someone or something. I have to say, I was far from impressed with this movie.

Besides being a generic and therefore also for most part predictable movie, it also is a very poorly done one. It handles none of its horror or mystery elements very well and its story feels far too drawn out.

It features a silly dragging story, in which everything takes way longer than truly needed. I strongly feel that this movie would have been way better as a 20 minutes short. But no, this movie is actually over 80 minutes long, which indeed makes this movie feel 60 minutes too long.

For most part, it's actually being a pretty boring movie, not in the least because for the first half of the movie there isn't a visible villain in it. It's still more of a whodunit at that point, which also is a poorly executed thing about this movie, seeing how it has only 3 other 'big' role characters in it, who are the potential suspects. So you have a 33% of guessing who eventually is going to turn out to be the killer but are you going to care enough to even take a guess? I really don't think so. It's also always a somewhat annoying aspect about these type of genre movies anyway; it really doesn't matter who the killer is, since it literally always could be just about anybody and it's not going to change much whether 'Jimmy' or 'Johnny' turns out to be the eventual killer.

But the movie is not just playing around with the idea of having a killer on the loose, it's also trying to be a ghost story type of movie. This is the only thing the movie ever manages to become remotely effectively mysterious and interesting with but it all pretty much gets abandoned in the second half of the movie, which was a disappointment for me.

So really, both halves of this movie have more weaknesses than strengths in it and combined, this movie feels too flawed. It's never exciting enough, never tense, not really very original with any of its horror and story aspects and often a quite boring one as well and an overall needlessly long watch.

I just never had a good time watching this.

3/10

Watch trailer