ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

dkruggel SPOILER ALERTThis movie starts out with a great premise. You have a town where everyone except one guy disappeared in 1940. Well decades later a group of historians or whatever they are get information on it and retrace the steps of the townsfolk for the purposes of getting material to write a book. We aren't even told really who these people are. What are their skills or credentials? You are going to be given scenes of pseudo psycho babble "evaluations" one character does on the others which are never actually explained. Why does he do this? Dunno and by the end of the movie you won't care. This is a movie about the descent into madness caused by some external force that from what I can tell is never, ever explained. I mean this is so disappointing and frankly, this is lazy film making and shoddy story telling.Yes some of these artsy oriented film makers think this is solid work. It's not. This is lazy story telling. Why? Because in good story telling you have to come up with something that explains the central mystery. You have to take the reader or viewer from A to B and have it make sense. There are lots of ways to do this. Yellowbrickroad does none of this.Instead we have characters descend into madness. For example the first initial kill scene is stupid. One male character attacks a female character after she takes the vintage hat he found and was wearing. I sat there wondering why that scene didn't end up on the cutting room floor. After that the characters have the full on breakdown of the group and it makes no sense whatsoever.Yes, there's this mysterious music they are hearing and for effect the director cranks the volume from time to time to apparently shock you. Trust me. This fails miserably. In fact, all I did was turn down the volume when the music was cranked up. Now don't get me wrong. Sometimes I'm OK with a good open ended ending. Sometimes mystery is satisfying. In Yellowbrickroad that's not the case. The ending looks tacked on. Here's the spoiler so quit reading. The main character is struggling at the end crawling on the ground and then voila he's back in the town in the movie theater. He sits down to watch the movie of their adventure or whatever it was. We get a flash of the dead all around him and then some pictures on the screen and he, oh my god, yes he screams. Here are somethings any film maker reviewing this needs to keep in mind so as to not repeat the mistakes of this movie.1. crisp clean clear images and film quality 2. proper microphone use 3. don't wash out the color when editing 4. don't use annoying sound effects to try to tell a story 5. explain your mystery with a logical or some kind of understandable conclusionI gave this movie a rating of 1 for awful because it is. This is a bad movie.

thekarmicnomad I am sure I am going to get flak for this, but I liked this movie.I picked it up on Netflix meaning my expectations were quite low. As a cheeky little horror this did OK.In the 1930's the entire population of a small town in 'no-where' USA took a walk down an isolated mountain trail and didn't come back. No one ever found them. A documentary crew decide to see if they can find what happened to them.Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie will not be overly surprised what occurs next. The cast is good, the tension is cranked up notch by notch. The film uses some very effective devices so - when it all hits the fan and they realise they are dealing with more than an angry bear - the movie stays grounded. I did find this scary in places, the desolate, wide open trails and shadowy, densely packed woodlands become lonely and menacing.The production runs hot and cold. There is one shot with some extremely amateur effects that destroys the film, and could have been better handled left off screen. Yet a sequence depicting the characters being hit by sonic blasts is very effective and harrowing.The ending is a bit ambiguous. In all, not super, but for a Netflix movie I quite liked it.

utgard14 Pretentious amateur attempt at an ambiguous horror movie. I hate crap like this. It's not intelligent. It's not thought-provoking. It's not original. The filmmakers wanted so badly for it to be a memorable and enigmatic film that they forgot to make it a good one. It's a boring chore to sit through that has ZERO scares and no atmosphere. There are a couple of moments you have to laugh at the ineptitude of it but that's the closest thing to a positive reaction it got from me.I only saw this because of Cassidy Freeman, who I was familiar with from Smallville. Being the only person with any "name" in the cast, she is advertised as though she were the star. She most definitely is not. She's in a minor supporting role and is killed off fairly early. But she provides this boring mess of a film's only highlight: the most ridiculous death scene in movie history. I can't believe they were serious with that. Avoid this garbage at all costs.

pipewelda First off can anyone please tell me if there's a prequel being written or even a part 2? I absolutely 100% loved this movie. It has all the horror one needs all wrapped in a nice tight package. This movie had me right from the start. Don't let a few bad reviews keep you from watching this hidden GEM! It's pure creepy all the way. I watched it four or five times now and it never gets old. I would really love it if they would do a prequel of the whole town issue. But I'll take a sequel as well. I noticed a lot of people had a tough time figuring this movie out. IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO FIGURE OUT AT ALL! Watch it a few times and you'll get it. It reminds me of being thrown in hell with the demons playing head games with me.