The Lost Review
To call Jack Ketchum’s novel’s film adaptation The Lost the most disappointing film I’ve ever watched might be an overstatement simply because for all intensive purposes its a direct to DVD low budget film but with all the hype around this film I still can’t get over how bad it actually was. To start off with I want to talk about all the extremely positive reviews on not only this site but nearly everywhere else I read about this film the phrases such as cult classic and even one of the best horror film of all time have even been mentioned. Firstly and most important is this is not horror. Just because you have characters in your film that do terrible things and there is some blood that doesn’t make it horror. At best its a Exploitation film which if done right I love but this film is anything but good. Before I start attacking this film too much
I’ll give you a brief synopses.”SPOILER ALERT!” Four years ago Ray Pye a nineteen year old loser, his girlfriend Jen and his friend Tim are hanging out at a lake for the day. Ray discovers two teenage girls and for some unexplained reason decides it would be fun to kill them. Jump ahead four years later and the three of them are still pretty much up to the same old shit. Somehow Ray never got arrested for shooting and killing the two girls even though every detective in the film seems to be convinced that he did it. This is all in the first ten minutes of the film after which the rest of the film just kind of drags along with really no narrative or intriguing plot points in which to interest the viewer.
The remaining roughly ninety minutes consist of the three main characters plus numerous other throw away cast members that had nothing to do with the story, having sex, doing drugs and having even for laughably filmed sex until nearly two hours into the film Ray finally snaps and just starts going around and shooting everyone until he is finally beaten to death by a detective that has a personal grudge against him. If you think I dumbed down the plot or simplified it your dead wrong. There really isn’t any plot. Some of the side characters you think might be the missing piece of the story like the teenage girl thats having a sexual relationship with a sixty year old detective. There relationship has absolutely nothing to do in regards to the plot but I thought that she might have had a connection with one of the girls that had been murdered four years before but no. She was simply another throwaway character in the film. Then there is another girl that ends up being the girl Ray falls in love with. Her mother kills herself which the film devotes a good ten minutes too, which I can still not understand since she had never been mentioned before in the film and really has no baring on what happens in the story later on.
Okay so now that you have an idea at what a mess of a story this film presents I think its important to mention that I’ve only ever read one Ketchum novel which was The Girl Next Door. I loved the book and although the film adaptation wasn’t perfect it was a very good film. What I’m getting at is I don’t know how close this film is to the book and maybe some of the characters do have bigger parts in the book and maybe the story does have a point but what shocks me is everything I’ve read including interviews with Ketchum himself says how good of an adaption the film is to the novel. This makes me wonder if maybe this is why Ketchum has never reached the hights of success that King, Struab, Saul and even Smith have reached as horror writers. The main problem with the film is its utter lack of direction and story telling. The film has no point after probably the first half hour I knew exactly what would happen to the characters yet I was still force to watch them do nothing but fuck and partake in drug use for well over an hour. This brings me to the directing of Chris Siverston. He directed this film a few years back and I find it funny how most people have seemed to ignore what he has given us since in the way of horror. Thats right Silverston is the talented director behind last years big budget masterpiece “I know who killed me”. Say what you want about Lohan but the truth is that she is not the sole reason why the film died in the box office before it even got of it’s feet, the fact is the film was just plain awful and I’m a firm believer that the directing was a big part of it. I think a great example of the incompetent directing was the sex montage in a later part of the film which was utterly pointless. The scene was supposed to be shocking but was laughable at how stupid and poorly done it was. I’ve honestly seen better porn direction in a Bang Bros video.
Thats the problem with the scene its exactly that, just porn. I’m the first guy to admit I love exploitation and I’ve probably seen more horror porn and 70’s sleaze then anyone but the exploitation scenes just didn’t fit in the film and were done so poorly that they became boring instead of entertaining and fun like they should be. Some people might also argue that the scenes of sex in the film help establish Ray has a deeply disturbed and vastly confused young man but the meanings of the scenes were so in your face and poorly directed that I took offense. A piece of advice to filmmakers out there if your shooting a scene thats supposed to have a deeper meaning then what’s right in front of you don’t treat your audience like idiots and hit them over the head with the meaning. Its worth mentioning about the gore as well, which some people would have you believe is great. Its passable at best when it actually does show up which is not for the first hour and a half plus. The only gore in the entire film is at the very beginning which although the gore is alright the set up of the scene doesn’t make any sense since the locations of the wounds and the severity change throughout the scene and your never exactly sure who got shot or where.
The rest of the blood and gore come in the final few minutes of the film when Ray goes on his killing spree. The deaths and scenes of torture are supposed to be disturbing but there really isn’t much to look at just a bit of blood and some brains. Another problem was that the goriest deaths in the film happen to the people that you know the least and the last few victims you’ve never even seen before in the film and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was an awful choice by the filmmakers because it takes the viewer out of the film. If I haven’t invested anything in the character then why should I care about what happens to them. This includes the scene were Ray stabs an unborn child to death by stabbing the lady’s womb. Its supposed to be shocking and hard to watch but did neither for me. Instead all it did was feel cheap and an uncreative way of creating an emotion from the viewer. There has also been talk about the music. I totally agree that its great music the problem is that it has no place in the film and just adds to the disjointed jumbled mess that is The Lost. Now even with a terrible film like this there is always a few positives and this one is no different. Within the first five minutes you get to see Erica Brown or better know to her fans as Misty Mundae totally nude which is never a bad way to start a film.
Sadly though she is one of the first two victims and is killed off way too soon. The other thing worth mentioning is Marc Senter as Ray which was really the only way I could keep watching the film. Simply put the kid can act. He was given some truly stupid lines and had terrible motivation for what he did but his performance was nearly perfect. His skill as an actor was head and shoulders above anything else in the film including the rest of the cast that for the most part ranged from down right annoying to just plain bad. There is no doubt that you’ll see him in future work that is much better its just a shame that his talent was wasted in this film. I normally don’t go into such detail about film in my reviews but with all the positive reviews I thought it was important for me to try and explain to you everything that is wrong with this film and it truly saddens me to see a film like this get so much attention within the horror community while others don’t. Hopefully I was able to get my point across and convince you not to pay money to see this.
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