Starry Eyes (2014)

You won't be disappointed!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This film is brilliant and beautiful filmed. The Cinematography in this film is beautiful. Very 80s vibes. I thought the story was very interesting and different. Very underrated film. More people needs to support this film and independent filmmakers. Kevin Kölsch & Dennis Widmyer done a awesome job directing and wrote starry eyes. The acting was great in the film especially the lead actress Alex Essoe.

Intent on winning the lead role in an upcoming horror film, an aspiring actress gradually surrenders herself to the increasingly bizarre demands of the film's casting agents and producer in this odd little film with some remarkable parallels to Nicolas Winding Refn's 'The Neon Demon'. The film's best asset is the 80s style synthesizer music score, which provides ample eeriness at key points. The other big highlight is Alex Essoe as the waif-like protagonist who undergoes some massive progressions throughout as she truly transforms, just like one of the casting agents say that she has to early on. On that note, it is the early scenes here that work best, most notably, the cold and uncomfortable initial two auditions with some elongated silences. Die-hard horror fans though might prefer the latter stages of the film since they are the wildest and goriest. They also make the least amount of sense, however, with the film never really exploring the details of the pact she makes to get the leading role, nor the cult that she gets embroiled with, an occasional visible pentagram aside. And yet, the film still essentially works even with such plot details left murky and ill-explained. This might not be the subtlest of films about being ruthless in order to get ahead in life, but it is certainly one of the most atmospheric and offbeat, leaving several images that are hard to shake from the mind.

I checked this title out because, according to quite a few horror movie sites, this one is a must see. Wrong. It was an over-acted disappointment.The film plods along at a relatively snail's pace, and the payoff isn't all that rewarding. One of the problems I noticed was the old school method of having the actors over-play their emotions. That technique was done to extremes here, making the flick cheesy in places.My biggest gripe was that the movie went from Point A to Point B to Point C and those points had very little to do with each other. It's almost as if disparate scenes were tacked on to bring the movie out to its expected 90 minute length. Too many questions were raised and none of them were answered. I suspect the only folks who would like this kind of movie making would be students at film schools who are eager to learn the concepts of continuity, character development, and so on. For the rest of us, it's just a tragic reminder of how millennials today lack the depth of their script-writing ancestors. Too bad. Nice try, though.

For those who have been complaining that American horror hasn't kept up with European or Japanese Horror, well, how about Starry Eyes? It's equal parts Martyrs and Audition. It doesn't really make a lick of sense but the acting is so good and the tension is so high, who gives a care? It's really not as graphic and violent as others have let on, but since the tension builds so effectively during the first two thirds of the film, the violence of the last act just seems over the top, and that's a pretty cool accomplishment. I'm giving this a ten because it's a masterpiece of horror. How I didn't even hear about it until two years after its release is beyond me but whatever.