Written by Old Bluffer 12th Nov 2009

[contains spoilers, but some films deserve to be spoiled...]

Tommy dreams about owls, and not in a good, Hundred Acre Wood kind of way.  These owls are more of the Anal Probing without Lubrication variety (or Strigidae Sodomiticum as any twitcher will know).

Anyway, it turns out he's not alone, other people in his hometown of Nome, Alaska share the same nightmare, and this has piqued the interest of a psychologist, Dr Abigail Taylor.

She puts him in a trance to recall the dream in more detail (there is a lot of this in the film, and it's all very dull, as you'll see if you read through to the end of this review), and he gets a bit upset and then goes home and kills his wife, two children and himself.

Dr Taylor doesn't seem to learn from this, and does the same thing to someone else a short while later, but luckily they get away with merely being paralysed from the neck down.

So is Dr Taylor just a really bad hypnotist, or is something more mysterious at play?

Well, it turns out that it all a rather tragic accident - the local owl sanctuary in Nome hit upon the idea of doing a subliminal PR campaign, by getting trained owls to stare at people forlornly whilst they slept.  It all backfires of course, and the freaky looking owls just end up causing suicides instead.

Actually, the above is not the actual plot - which is a shame, as it couldn't possibly have turned out worse than the actual explanation, which vaguely involves aliens who speak Sumerian (got to love those Sumerians).



Old Bluffer's Thoughts

I honestly cannot stress enough how irritatingly pretentious and drawn out the weak premise of this film is.

It can be summed up very simply by: "A few people in a town have nightmares about owls who are actually aliens that abduct them occasionally. A psychologist investigates, which pisses off the aliens, and she ends up in a wheelchair. Nothing else happens."

Whoever thought it would be a good idea to show "archive" footage of psychiatric interviews in split screen alongside "re-enactments" must have some kind of debilitating brain disorder and for the good of humanity should be banned from making any more films.

And then slapped, hard.

Seriously, we have to listen to utterly tedious dialogue, of people being put into a hypnotic trance, where they talk about f****** owls for several minutes and then scream.  Putting this in split screen just means it subjectively feels twice as long, and this happens throughout the entire movie.

After a while I found myself re-reading the f-stop information on one of the cameras being used in the interviews, in a desperate bid to keep myself awake.

Actually, with hindsight, falling asleep would have been a blessing, but the acting in this film is so bad that even multiple scenes of a hypnotherapist counting slowly backwards to put their subject into a trance failed to relieve my misery.

The pain doesn't end there though. Forgetting a clunky script, a lifeless shell of a plot, terrible acting and pacing that would make watching watercress grow look like an action film by comparison, there are plenty of relatively minor irritations that served to provide extra annoyance.

Like the shaky hand-held camera used on all the aforementioned excruciating trance sequences.  For the love of cinematography, use a damn tripod for static scenes!  Did the director really think that constant juddering would somehow make the scene more interesting?!

Or what about the "real" Dr Abigail Tyler, who speaks in an infuriatingly drawn out manner, like she is reading football tips on the premium rate hotline that Homer Simpson once phoned up:

TV:    So call me now!  $5 for the first minute, $2 for each additional minute!
Homer: [dials the number]
Voice: You... have reached... the Coach's...  Hot-...
Homer: Line.
Voice: Line.
Homer: Yeah, lay it on me, Coach.
Voice: In the game... of... Mi... am... i...
Homer: Mm hm.
Voice: Versus Cin...
Homer: Cincinnati.
Voice: cin...
Homer: Cincinnati.
Voice: nat...
Homer: Cincinnati.
Voice: i...
Homer: Come on, come on, don't you realize this is costing me money!


(notice I'm quoting from a cartoon instead of the film here, as there are no memorable lines in the movie I'm unfortunately writing about)

Looking at the usual reviews on the web, I see that one of the main complaints is that it is lying about being based on real events, and doesn't use genuine archive footage as it pretends to.  This is missing several points though:

First of all, you'd have to a be a certified moron to think that any of this was real.  In fact, it is possible to tell that you're about to be witness to a memorably large pile of bollocks, just from the opening scene where Milla Jovovich breaks the 4th Wall and earnestly tells us that we're about to see real footage and we should keep our minds open.

Secondly, it wouldn't even matter that it is all spoofed, providing it was an interesting / creepy / entertaining / not entirely boring spectacle - but it fails dismally on all those criteria.

In summary, even if you are the kind of tin-foil-hat-wearing idiot that believes Sumerians etched blueprints for the Millenium Falcon thousands of years ago, I'll bet you are still bored silly by this movie.