hyped garbage

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I will not bother to recount the story - it is a familiar one, I'll just mention the good points of the movie: 1- Brittany Murphy does an excellent job - she is pretty fearless going in the attic numerous times; not getting creeped out by the old house noises; is convincing as she gets wrapped up in the story of the prior residents (as observed by the husband's extensive videotaping - which Brittany finds); 2- good use of "less is more" approach to filming the build up to the climax - very good creepy music - set an atmosphere of dread - punctuated by the woman screaming (which did not seem to bother Ms. Murphy - it sure would have me); 3.) maddening ambiguity - did the guys wife, Lucy, actually have an affair with Luke? she never denies it - keeps repeating "We're having our baby" - as if that would stop her. The ending has a couple of twists and some possibly disturbing aftermath to the events. One other reviewer thought that the writers thought some of this up at the last minute - I agree. The bad: too coincidental that Brittany and the woman in the house had similar circumstances - they did not have to do that to make it interesting. Also Brittany was there to write, but in the whole movie I did not see her write a word - so I think the title is just an excuse or afterthought to the plot. They had to get her to the house by herself in some way.One other good thing - the subtle undertones that Brittany and her roommate were more than just friends. It never came out, but it looked like her roommate had the hots for her at times - but maybe I'm imagining it.Overall entertaining. One other thing I can say, unlike so many horror movies I have started watching lately - at least I watched this one to the end. One line I liked "Old house are like old people - grumpy and testy." So true. DonB

Brittany Murphy is Alice, a writer in her early 30's who moves into a spooky old Victorian mansion in order to be alone to work on her book as well as distance herself from a traumatic nervous breakdown. But no sooner is Alice settling in, that the house is getting the worst of her imagination courtesy of strange noises and nightmares. Now Alice, already in a fragile mental state, must deal with that as well as an ex who recently got out of prison.I found myself enjoying this film much more than I thought that I would've, thanks in no small part to a nice atmospheric soundtrack as well as a surprisingly adequate subdued performance by Murphy. All of this is almost (but not quite) enough to make up for a pretty clichéd and heavily predictable storyline. The late Britt does the most with what little she's given.My Grade: C

"Deadline" is a very creepy film in many ways. The late Brittany Murphy looks like death, at least partly on purpose as her character, Alice, is very sickly but this is no way to remember her. It was literally like watching a diseased ghost, and that realism was too much for me.A writer in a remote house with psychological problems hears and sees strange disturbances but is it all in her head or is somebody, or something, trying to kill her? The story has been done many times before, and this wasn't a particularly good rendition of it. That's the main reason why the IMDb rating is so low. The filmmakers even seemed to get confused with the ending. They gave us a resolution but they hadn't quite worked out all the details.The film itself though, was very well shot. They set-up a creepy atmosphere from the very beginning and never let up. Subtle camera work kept up the same suspense level throughout. This film was made on a low-budget and they made it well.Recommending this is tricky. I was faithfully terrified - not so much because of the storyline but because of what I was watching. Brittany Murphy was so pallid and anemic, it was scary. And the atmosphere and slow moving camera shots were done so efficiently well, significantly better than most horror-thrillers that I have seen. If you want to be scared from a well-told story, you won't find that here. If you want to be scared from the realism, then you just might want to take a look. If I knew what I was getting myself into, I wouldn't have watched it. And yet, at the same time, I'm glad that I did - I like seeing low-budget independent films made well.

I just watched this horrid film 2 days ago. At no point did I think this was in any way good. The only reason I suffered/survived the whole thing was that I was trying to see if maybe it was one of those slow at first and then gets good movies. I was wrong. I spent the last two days trying to figure this movie out. The way it ended, it all made NO sense to me. Then as I was reading other reviews to see if anyone felt the same, or if someone had understood it and explained. Thankfully, someone did explain it. Sort of. It was more of a 'theory', but I'll go with it, since it made sense to me after I thought about it. Basically, Alice goes to the supposed creepy house to finish a screenplay, her 'girlfriend' drops her off and then leaves. Alice starts seeing/hearing weird things in the house. Alice finds a box of tapes and starts watching them. Uses them to write her screenplay. Witnesses a murder on it. Turns out a lot of what we saw, happened in her head. She was reliving repressed events. After, unfortunately remembering the movie, Alice called Rebecca at one point and asked her to look up information on David and Lucy. At the end, when Alice calls Rebecca again to tell her that David is in the house, Rebecca has no idea what Alice is talking about and says "I haven't talked to you in over a week, I've been worried about you." And that leads me to believe that the conversation with Ben didn't happen. For one, if Rebecca hadnt heard from Alice all week, she didn't really tell Alice that Ben was out of jail. Which lead me to believe that Ben isn't really out of jail... And he couldn't have possibly known where Alice is, nor could he have gotten her number.From what I gathered, Lucy=Rebecca, Alice=David... and Ben seems pretty unimportant...but maybe he plays Davids mom or the one that 'David' thought 'Lucy' was cheating on him with? Who knows.. If you notice, at the beginning of the movie, when they're in the car, Alice has the video camera and is recording Rebecca. At the end of the movie, Rebecca goes downstairs to look for David, she finds only the video camera on the floor and on the tape she sees herself on a bed, just like when Alice first found the tapes and it showed Lucy on the bed and David recording her. There was so much and nothing at all going on in this movie at the same time.