Rot

I've had trouble sleeping for weeks until I watched this movie. I start the movie about 11pm on Shudder and I am out cold by 11:20pm!! I simply pick up where I left off the previous evening, then I am lulled to sleep by the most boring acting I've ever seen. The characters are almost all on one monotone level. Plus none of them are likeable, scary, interesting or even a tiny bit entertaining. The positive side is that it's so incredibly uninteresting it helps lull me to sleep no matter what the day has brought me to think about, for that I am eternelly grateful. Who knew kvetching Jewish folks could induce such boredom:

First of all, its always hard to watch a bunch idiot children try to confront something they dont understand. Its actually a great representation of americas college educated sheeple. But seriously, it really is a chaotic story with sub par acting.

Given Andrew Merril's extremely well-received short film with the same title, expectations were very high and it even received a special DVD release spot from TeatroVideo (with Mai-Chan's Daily Life and Vore Gore). That said, the nod to Cronnenberg is welcome. Acting and directing both above average. Character development is very good, esp for the genre. First act has a nice slow burn with good paranoia. Second act is basically just there. Wrong tempo, confined setting and very little hapening. Third act is okay as it has a couple of crazy scenes. Not a Cronnenberg homage and definitely not over the top violent (sans the cutting off of the penis and beating it to death with a hammer). 6/10.

When I sat down to watch "Rot", I must admit that I had expected quite something else than what this movie turned out to be. And for a horror movie, I must say that "Rot" was a swing and a miss.

I am not really sure what writer and director Andrew Merrill tried to accomplish with the script and storyline for this movie, because it felt more like a collection of randomly shot sequences that were put into a pseudo-chronological fashion in order to make a movie. I can't claim to have been entertained by what the script turned out to be. In fact, I found it to be a random scrambled mess that lacked proper coherency.

The characters in the movie sort of faded into one another for me. I couldn't really differentiate between the characters, as they were lacking motivation, background, personality and traits. It just felt like I was watching a puppet show of people milling about randomly.

When I read the synopsis, I must admit that it sounded like this movie had the ingredients of being a movie that could be set in the early stages of a zombie outbreak. But turns out that it was nothing of the kind. In fact, I have honestly no clue what "Rot" turned out to be; aside from being a boring movie.

As for the acting performances in "Rot". Well, don't go expecting to be blown away by any up and coming grand performers here. This is by no means award-winning material. And I think that the actors and actresses were definitely hindered in performing properly given the fact that the script was just downright bad, and the characters were flaccid and lacking details.

I managed to sit through the entire ordeal up to the end, hoping that the movie would become better along the way. But it just never did that, and I was left unimpressed and unentertained. I am rating "Rot" a generous two out of ten stars, mostly because the production level of the movie was actually adequate.

I was bored stupid for most of this movie. Waded through the continuity errors, endlessly boring dialogue and really bad acting. Then the last ten minutes I sat there with my mouth hanging open wondering if I'd wandered into a wannabe film student's Cronenberg nightmare. And the whole 'plot' makes about that much sense as well, which is to say, not at all.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Makes Troll2 look like a masterpiece. Although I did laugh at the end, kinda, in a where did this come from, are you kidding me, this is the cringiest thing I've ever seen kind of way.

Not recommended.