The Unspoken

If you want spend a good time with your girl/boy-friend watch this movie for fun time. It's a common movie of haunted house, freak characters, bad boys, and move-it-self objects. The plot began typically when a single mother and her son moved on to the creepy house. Then typically the mother hired a baby sister to care her "mute" boy. After that begin strange and rare events who in the develop of the plot has been linked with past stories of the characters and the town. The movie has moments of horror and suspense. Isn't a great plot but it's simple and short movie that gives a surprise ending.

This is an interesting idea handled in a poor and predictable way. My favourite thing about it has to be the main villain's accent. For some reason he sounds like a 1950s gangster, "now listen here see". Imagine him in a zoot suit with a tommy gun and it becomes very entertaining.

The rest of the cast are fine. The creepy little boy could easily have been swapped out with a ham sandwich and it wouldn't have made much difference as all he does is stare and vanish, but that's par for the course with this sort of film. The original spooky child of the early 00s, Jodelle Ferland tries her best, but she never really has much to do. She also decided to play her role like a demure Victorian nanny, which is completely at odds with the rest of the film. It's impossible for me to see Lochlyn Munroe as anyone other than Greg from Scary Movie so he's a lost cause. There are other people but they're all bland and uninteresting.

This film also suffers from jumpscare abuse. I'm very jumpy, jumpscares get me, but after the first dozen or so I'd become desensitised to them. Every few minutes there's another piercing screech and a thud, but it's just a cat, or a shadow, or sometimes it's an actual over the top ghost, or sometimes it's just for fun. There's no tension, no build-up, just increasingly ineffective loud noises.

All in all, if you're bored and need something on in the background, this is a perfectly adequate horror film. If you want to be scared or immersed in an interesting story, look elsewhere.

Overall, it could have been a very interesting film.

The simple plot is that a young girl gets a job as a baby sitter for a new family living in a house known in the small town for it's reputation, but then there is an interesting twist to the ghost story that could have been an eye opener and made this something horror fans would want to gravitate to

The thing is, the production on this was weak, not because it's a low budget horror film, but nothing came together in an exciting way. Everything was too standard to be interesting. you can tell from the beginning that the frights were not going to do anything. From the first "scare" all of them just bounce right off you rather than having them bounce you out of your seat.

I really wish it could have been better, but it was just boring.

You know the routine by now: a young family moved into a house with a history and before long are assailed by all manner of weird goings on in the form of spectres and sinister events. It soon transpires that the past is very much present and the new tenants will soon have a fight for survival on their hands...

THE UNSPOKEN - which I saw under the alternate title of THE HAUNTING OF BRIAR HOUSE - is an extremely routine low budget horror film from Canada. The plotting is entirely familiar and the scare sequences well choreographed in advance. Even worse, there's an obvious murder mystery aspect which makes things feel even more stereotypical (anyone who's seen the Daniel Craig film DREAM HOUSE will know what to expect here).

A couple of gory moments are stirred into the mix but the ultimate pay-off is disappointing. Watch out for Neal McDonough, cameoing as the sheriff.

If you want to see a horror movie, and you have seen most of them, this one will entertain you, is not the best but is a decent horror flick with decent acting, it can keep you trying to understand what is going one, and you wont know until the end of the movie. Please do not see this movie with great expectations, but I can guarantee that if you are fan of horror movies this one will be decent for you.