Movie Review: Hurt (2018)

Synopsis: A soldier, Tommy, returns home to his wife, Rose, but has obvious signs of PTSD. He surprises Rose on Halloween by offering to take her to a haunted hayride event. However, he soon begins acting strangely then disappears completely. Waiting at home for him, Rose suddenly finds her life in danger from a masked assailant. She assumes it's Tommy but soon learns she may be wrong.

Who's in it? The movie stars Emily Van Raay, Andrew Creer, Stephanie Moran, Bradley Hamilton and Michelle Treacy.

Review: I came across this movie yesterday morning and, since the description made it sound like an interesting slasher flick, added it to my library. My wife and I decided to watch it last night and, 90 minutes later, regretted the decision.

I think the movie's premise had potential. Since Tommy (Creer) had some serious mental health issues, the film had the flexibility to go a number of different directions ranging from him being a reluctant hero to him becoming the bad guy. If you throw in the haunted carnival and a wife (Van Raay) who might have been a bit too obsessed with Halloween, this could have been a memorable film.

The problem was the movie fails to capitalize on any of it and instead is a very slow, very dull film that wastes a very large chunk of its run time on everything from showing trees blowing in the wind to Rose and Tommy sitting at a bar staring at each other and not talking. It was as though the filmmakers only had enough script to fill 30 minutes and used every trick in the book to stretch the movie out to 93 minutes.

It's one thing to have all that filler leading up to the main plot of the movie but it continued even after the carnival, when Rose was being stalked, featuring drawn out scenes like the one that had Rose sitting at her kitchen table drinking a glass of orange juice and searching her empty house. It finally reached a point where I was pretending to poke my TV while saying "do something," before picking up the remote and fast forwarding to the last 5 minutes, just to see how it ended (and no longer caring how they reached that ending). For the record, the movie ended exactly how we predicted it would, meaning we missed nothing important.

Final Opinion: As I said, the premise and characters had potential and, at minimum, this could have been an average slasher movie. Instead, poor execution and a very slow pace make this film painful to watch.

My Grade: F