Absolutely agree. Watched this with a friend and she was so nonplussed by the predictable 'scares' that she began to doze off about half way in.
The next morning we perused IMDb reviews for what we assumed would be some laughs. To our horror we discovered that almost every review was not only positive, but positively glowing, often with scores of 10/10. Perhaps it is the fact that it was the boring kind of bad that makes it almost no fun to bash? The only really effective sequence was when the little boy when to speak to his mother and she kept referring to "we" and sorta motioning to the darkened doorway as if there was someone there. That gave us both a chill. But that was the only time we weren't laughing.
Anyway, everything you said was accurate, I will just add a few comments:
The editing and pacing was atrocious. In the first five minutes we commented on how jarring the tension-free opening sequence was and how it gave everything away immediately.
Having the original short's star a little cameo was cute, but the feature film wasn't even 5% as successful in terms of tension or humour. Even the pacing of her clicking the light switch was wrong this time around.
We had to laugh when she tried to warn Bella's dad that she saw something in the warehouse but he waves her off because "I have to take this call." but then finishes the call literally THREE SECONDS after she leaves the room. What a dick.
The rest of the film was your standard string of tiresome cliches, including the cliche of cliches, the creepy-little-demon-voiced-girl-in-the-hospital-psych-ward trope, complete with the doctor's audio recordings of their sessions that someone listens to for exposition's sake.
What was that stain on the chair? Are we to believe that they completely atomized a young girl by exposing her to light therapy? Or was her burned body removed? But if she died from exposure to light, why did she come back as a malevolent spirit that is also sensitive to light? What's the point of her being dead in the first place?
Why did she pursue the step-father's assistant at the warehouse? Why did she kill him at the warehouse instead of at the house when her ability to travel is severely limited and entirely dependent on a lack of light? How difficult must have it to been for Diana to travel all the way to the warehouse. Why would she risk her own destruction just to kill him where he works?
While I can see (somewhat) why Diana would want to kill the step-father, why did Diana pursue Rebecca & Martin to Rebecca's apartment? There is no point to this whatsoever other than the needed to pad the film with another location.
Also, why, if Diana was so determined to kill Rebecca, did she take time to chill out and noisily carve her own name into the floor under the carpet? Oh yeah, so that Rebecca could flash back to her childhood. Of course. The childhood drawing cliche. YAWN.
Why did Diana write out a bunch of exposition on the walls of the basement that just happened to be visible in the black light that Martin just happened to stumble upon in the basement only moments earlier?
Why does a regular flashlight suddenly burn holes through Diana's arm when no previous light has harmed her? Previously the presence of light has only limited her movement. I mean, except when it burned her as a kid. Uh.. but why then did the turning on of lights previously only make her vanish, not scream in pain and burn like it did with the flashlight?
Same thing with all that you articulated: why does she turn of the lights one second and not the next? Why can she teleport one moment and not the next? Why are doors etc. in her way one second and not the next? Why is she sometimes harmed by light and other times not?
Besides all of this, the script and acting (perhaps limited by the terrible dialogue) were abysmal. Amateur hour all around. Felt like a lazy cash-grab. Too bad, because the basic idea of a malevolent force whose movement was limited by light could have been developed into something interesting. Instead they took a fun little short and pumped it full of the most obvious plot points and horror conventions and cliches and even then barely managed to pad it out to 80 minutes.
the roman empire never died, it just turned into the catholic church
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