A group of friends escaping the city for a weekend away have a simple plan, to tour the coast for a relaxing weekend. Things hit a snag when one of the friends spots a seductive, sultry young woman waving for help off the shore of one of many secluded islands along the coast. Reaching out to rescue her turns deadly and they risk everything to get off the island alive.
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Reviews
if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
I've always found actress Teresa Srbova extremely attractive, so when I found this flick playing on satellite one evening, and saw her in the cast, I had to watch it. I thought the cinematography was great, but the story was non existent. I was disappointed and gave it a low rating here. Then years later, I found the DVD at a swap meet for $1.00 and thought it would be fun to watch it again.After the movie was completed, I felt the same way I did the first time until I played the deleted scenes. There is a long deleted scene in special features where Silka (Srbova) is explaining the entire reason for everything happening on the island to the other female lead. I was dumbfounded why that scene was taken out of the flick, because it actually would have saved the movie.Then interesting enough, I decided to try and reach Andrew Hull (director) to ask him why he removed the most important scene in the movie. It turns out that Andrew Hull was killed in May 2010 in a bicycle accident, and the movie was picked up later by Lionsgate in October 2010. It was messed with, released in March, 2011, and the final edit is nothing like Andrew Hull probably would have finished it. Who the heck knows who did the final cut of this film. All I can tell you is : if this key scene wasn't removed from this movie by whomever, this film would be sitting here with a much higher rating than it is. Editing tells the story of a film. Too bad for Andrew Hull, that he died before he had the chance to piece his movie together for a final edit that might have told the story he originally had in mind.
It's not often you get a modern horror film with its origins in Greek myth, but SIREN is such a movie. Sadly, it wastes the potential of that premise with a storyline that turns out to stick to its low budget origins in a film that features plenty of tease and very little in the way of action or incident.I don't mind mood pieces that focus on brooding atmosphere but there's none of that either. Where SIREN does succeed is in creating a sufficiently exotic locale for the action - this British movie was shot in Tunisia and it looks great. The twentysomething cast don't have much opportunity to shine given the vagueness of their characters, and when the supernatural aspects of the storyline finally show up they're dealt with in the most ordinary way imaginable.Where I do have to praise the film is in the performance of lead actress Anna Skellern. She starts off being treated in purely physical terms as a Kelly Brook-style voluptuous figure, but by the end she's shown previously unimagined depths of fragility and determination. Skellern is very good, the single stand out in what is a generally lacklustre movie.
As another reviewer stated, do not believe the cover. You will be highly disappointed. But that is not the reason I was disappointed (mostly). Cover art aside the movie began really suspenseful and the beginning is really good. I liked it very much. Problem is, the rest of the movie didn't live up to the tone it did set early on. On the contrary it did almost fall apart.Almost because even though the female lead is good, the other female in this unfortunately wasn't as good. But I'm not sure you can blame her. I think the script needed a little more work. Because there are flashes of genuine greatness (at least that's how I felt about them), but it never really takes off
An excellent setup, nice idea but completely wasted in bad acting, bad directing and scripting. You know, if you are going to make a sexy horror movie you have to go all the way. I mean, why selling sex with the cover, why select the players so obviously by their looks, if you are not going to show a thing. On the other hand maybe you could have pull it off as a more serious horror movie with better actors. But not showing the sex scenes between the characters, specially the lesbian scene, is not having any sense of business at all.In the end, be clear of what kind of movie you want to make and try to make the better movie you can of the genre... Such a waste...