Homecoming (2009)

Such a frustrating disappointment

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I had already noted a low rating for this movie on various sites but the subject matter appealed to me as a fan of Misery, Play Misty for Me, Misery et al so I gave it a go expecting nothing of any shock value and was not disappointed on that front. This film had elements of all three of the aforementioned films but had too few pearls stretched out on a decidedly threadbare string.Almost immediately the viewer becomes frustrated at the stupidity of Mike and his girlfriend Elizabeth as they take a trip back to his roots where his "intense" - as Mike describes her - ex-girlfriend, Shelby, runs a bowling alley. After meeting some of Mike's friends, Elizabeth decides she wants to follow them on with Mike to the Bowling alley in spite of being informed about the existence of Shelby. After Shelby plies Elizabeth with tequila whilst playing the amiable ex, Elizabeth, keen to make a good first impression on Mike's parents decides she is too drunk to meet with them that night so Mike's police officer brother drives Elizabeth to a remote hotel and Mike back to his folks. This is where the first major flaw of the plot is seen. Would you seriously drop your young girlfriend off in a hotel car park in a strange and remote area without seeing her safely inside and ensuring she has secured a room? Apparently not as she is left to wheel her case in and wave from the door as her chaperones speed off into the night before being told there are in fact no vacancies and the sign that says otherwise is broken. This leaves Elizabeth to walk four miles West in the dark to locate another hotel until she flags down a passing car which promptly knocks her into a ditch.When she awakens, Elizabeth finds herself in a strange bedroom attached to a drip and being "nursed" by Shelby who is intent on hiding the injured girlfriend away whilst she desperately tries to win back the affections of her ex, Mike. It quickly becomes evident that Shelby is a dangerous psychopath and one wonders why the smart Elizabeth didn't just play along with her games and manipulate Shelby by asserting that she wanted to break up with Mike. A girl of her calibre could have easily cooked up some fictitious and feasible story which would have placated Shelby and ensured Elizabeth's relative safety. This is a common flaw in movies of this ilk. The hostage making ill-planned escape attempts, showing the fear that only feeds the hostage-taker or to the contrary, antagonising their captors and sustaining more injuries for their efforts.The characters were hard to care about in any capacity which is so often the case where teenagers are involved. Predicable diatribe in my opinion, lacking every ounce of substance that Misery brought to the screen.

When they arrive at his home town for a big celebration, a man's girlfriend is captured by his psychotic ex and tortured for stealing him away from her while he and his friends race to save her before it's too late.This one here is a rather curious thriller rather than an out-and-out horror effort. One of the main issues with this one is the really bland pacing, which has the abduction placed oddly later in the film than it should because it deals with the useless extraneous moments in the film where she's dealing with outside issues that have nothing to do with the main torture scenes. The majority of the scenes consist of either her attempting to get away only to be stopped without any kind of true punishment offered only to repeat the process again or his friends telling him to get on with his life, and it manages to plod along lifelessly instead of generating any interest. Rather than doing any kind of physical, damaging torture, it features only knock-outs or drugging and carries on in a series of lame parts that give off a thriller feel more than a true horror film, and the painful, agonizing moments of her trying to win him back or pining over a rejection don't help this one much. The finale does have some pretty decent moments, including the clever discovery of the kidnapping, some brutal confrontations down in the basement and a rousing conclusion, but it's all too claustrophobic and confining to really get where it could've gone. This is just too flawed and has too little right about it to really be of any importance.Rated R: Language and Violence.

I will start with the plot. Mike was the star quarterback in a blue-collar small town where football is everything. After receiving a scholarship to Northwestern University, he returns home over Christmas break and everyone is surprised to see him with a new girlfriend, Elizabeth, a pretty rich girl from Chicago. No one is more shocked than Mike's homecoming queen ex-girlfriend, Shelby, who desperately wants Elizabeth out of the picture. After a freak car accident leaves an injured Elizabeth at the mercy of Shelby, all hell breaks loose as Shelby does everything it takes to get Mike back.A Nice build to the main characters, As we get to know characters and you will care for the characters (Well I did) After the good build up to the characters then the movie really gets going and I was total hooked.I was actually shouting at the movie, I don't remember the last time I shouted at A movie, thats how much I really enjoyed watching this movie.This movie has some really good scenes and one nasty scene, (some will think it a total ripoff Misery). This scene made me look away.The acting was great from Main 3, but office Billy Fletcher (You may know as officer Burke from Final Destination 2) his acting was not that good (and is character was pain in the a*s) also the ending, they tried to go for a shocking ending but it didn't work and it just fell flat.Also Shelby is one hell of an Evil Bitch (Mischa Barton she did outstanding job on this movie). She was great.This movie will be compared to Mirsey as this could easily be passed as a sequel or even a remake of it.6/10

When seeing this film, I immediately thought of Kathy Bates' Oscar winning performance in holding James Caan hostage in "Misery."A young freshman accompanying her boyfriend back for a weekend homecoming gets much more than she bargained for when she is held captive by his vicious ex-girlfriend.The movie becomes a cat and mouse affair where the victim frantically tries to get away from her tormentor. Obviously, this is met without success.The ending could have been better. After getting a tremendous thumping from her helmet, when she is rescued by her boyfriend, the film appears to end only to have the demon waking up. Lord knows what else is in store. In addition, our fiend, Shelby, shot the policeman cousin of her lover when he discovered her escapade. Was he shot dead or just wounded? That's never clearly explained.