Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Dark Mirror (2007): The Good, the Bad and the Reflective Synopsis: A husband and wife, along with their young son, move into a new house that has a dark past. An old secret that lingers in the glass and mirrors of the house must be revealed before it is too late.The Good: The story is a somewhat intriguing one, even if it is clumsily executed. The idea is that "entities" can get trapped within glass or mirrors. Okay, that's kind of a cool idea. Not completely original, but yeah... we can work with that. The additional concept added is that of the protagonist, being a fledgling photographer, inadvertently captures the entity in her camera lens when she (rather inexplicably) takes a photo of her bathroom mirror. (Not sure I ever figured out why she was taking a picture of her bathroom mirror.... high def selfie?) Despite the fact that the story dissolves from here for me, the concept is quite interesting. The woman realizes, all too late, that if she takes a photo of someone, they wind up dead. Somehow the flash releases(?) the entity and they die. A lot could have been done with this idea, but the director's script and execution burdens the movie's progress of the idea. Sadly, you are left with a good concept and nothing more.The Bad: The movie is a slow burner, which can be good if the film is moving forward with solid character development. That, unfortunately, doesn't happen. The protagonist wife sees all the creepy stuff in the mirrors, while the husband is painted as the nauseatingly typical "it's all in your mind" horror stereotype. Even when shown things that cannot be explained and the Average Joe husband would say, "Wow, that is some abnormal junk right there", he shrugs it off and allows for the wife to become further "in this by herself". It's a tired device for allowing more of the overly used "OMG... I just saw a dark figure in the window" tricks. Used over and over in the movie for cheap "scares" that don't work, it exhausts the movie far too early and you are left caring little for the ending... you just want it to end. And it's too bad, because the ending is somewhat clever. The problem is that it takes far too long to set up the reasoning for all the happenings. See, the true story is that the house was owned by an artist who was passing his wife's paintings as his own and their deaths are the source of the evil entity. Nice little plot, however, they spend far too long on the protagonist figuring this all out that it ultimately loses any effect it may have had on the viewer. Kind of a shame. For me, this movie got bogged down by trying to do too much and even with so much to do, still found a way to be boring. That is a script issue and the reason it gets a "4" from me.The Reflective: The word "reflective" is a bit of an oxymoron in the context of this movie, because while the film centers around reflections and windows and mirrors, the director never reflected on how boring and obtrusive his script was turning out. The tone of the whole movie just felt too much like something made for the Lifetime channel. The pacing was horrible and just when something interesting would happen, the director would slow it right back down. The problem has less to do with the idea (which should drive the movie) and more do with the direction, flow and execution of the idea. There was real promise at some point when this idea was being fleshed out, but the director ruined it by trying to turn this into something too cerebral for its own good. The result is a movie I'd obviously never watch again and in a few weeks, I will have forgotten entirely that I ever did watch it.

****SPOILERS*** What's obviously an updated re-make of the 1946 thriller "The Dark Mirror" with Olivia De Havilland & Lew Aryes the film "Dark Mirror" has to do with housewife and part time professional photographer Deb Martin, Lisa Vidal, who becomes so obsessed with a mirror in her new home that it drives her over the edge or deep end by the time the movie is over. The mirror somehow interacts with Ded's camera after she casually took a photo of it. It's then that everyone she photographs ends up disappearing off the face the earth!Things get really weird when Deb's mom Grace, Lupe Ontiveros, shows up unexpectedly at the house with all these crazy stories of it being possessed by the ghost of it's previous owner an artist who also together with his wife dropped completely out of sight. It's then that Dob's workaholic husband Jim, David Chisum,starts to worry about her in that she may have a few screws loose upstairs: It turns out that Deb's mom Grace has been dead for the last five years! We get to see Ded slowly lose it when everyone she photographs starts to get edited out of the movie. As if they were somehow swallowed up in an other plane of existence. Even the police are puzzled in what's going on with all those that disappeared leave a number of clues, like blood trails, to them being brutally murdered without their dead and mutilated bodies to confirm it!***SPOILERS*** It's in the last 15 minutes that we the audience as well as Deb finally get some kind of handle to what exactly is going on in the film. And it's Deb herself who's the key to it without her really knowing about it! That's until it's too late for her as well as Jim who let the whole thing, his wife Deb's mental breakdown, go on too far to the point that he became a victim of it.

I stumbled upon this movie thinking it was a new TV show in the genre of the Twilight Zone or Tales from the Dark Side. It has the production value of a TV show but it soon became apparent that it was a movie that I'd just never heard of before.It started out promising enough (though clichéd) with a family moving in to a new house, which happens to be haunted. Strange things start happening to the wife involving mirrors. Pretty soon the writers find themselves tripping over the plot twists and story lines. The husband's complete lack of concern over the safety of his family, even as he suspects that his wife is a sociopath, makes no sense. The wife struggles with trying to figure out if the house is haunted or if she's crazy. A struggle shared by the writers, I might add. Much like Pirates of the Caribbean 2, the writers threw together a bunch of random story lines and never got them to gel together or make any sense.I will say that the movie was interesting enough to keep me watching, but the ending was disappointing because it never tied the story lines together.

Dark Mirror is one best horror flicks of 2009! It's scary but not the usual, banal 'blood and gore' scary - it's a Polanski kind of scary, a thinking person's horror film. The performances are fantastic and Lisa Vidal is mesmerizing. The scene in the bathroom where she's trying to convince her husband something is wrong with the house is absolutely brilliant - the kind of scene that is truly unforgettable, in that wonderfully unsettling way. Curious to see what this director does next because his talent really shines through despite the limitations of a presumably small budget. I think horror fans will definitely dig this flick - but I also think anyone who likes creative and intelligent film-making will appreciate it as well.