Altar (2014)

Very well executed

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

"Altar" and "The Haunting of Radcliffe House" are the same film. The Hamilton family moves into the old Radcliffe house in order to restore it. The townies are leery of the place and are not much help. Meg (Olivia Williams) and her husband Alec (Matthew Modine) perform the bulk of the work. They have an asthmatic daughter Penny (Antonia Clarke) and a son (Adam Thomas Wright) who is underdeveloped plot wise.While they are restoring they discover the proverbial secret room and this one has floor art, which is apparently an altar whose function is unknown. At this point strange things seem to happen as Alec punctured his finger and his blood fell to the floor in that room, "Hell Raiser" memory flash as it gets sucked up. The events build up slow as we discover what happens in that house.This is a run of the mill ghost story. Nothing really new, but it was done well.Guide: F-bomb, implied forced sex. Olivia Williams brief nudity (?) Statue nude being fondled.

It doesn't seem to be a clever idea to move into a house which has a disturbing history or a disturbing man who lived there. For one reason or another, people do tend to still go into those places. For one, we wouldn't have those horror movies if they didn't. And sometimes they're pretty decent. Also do not forget, these are just movies.Even if based in "reality" or at least at performances that feel real. The acting is more than decent here, the cast contributes to that, the scares are nicely thrown in there for good measure. They work most of the time and the ending is good in that terms too. You'll see most things coming of course, but that doesn't change the fact that this is watchable

No, this is not great filmmaking.(Must be a lot of cast and crew having rated this on here.)Just going to ramble about this in no special order. Some places it seems like they have used, I don't know, Adobe Premiere effects, or worse yet, effects that are in the camera itself.. Thats a little wtf, right?As far as I can remember, one or two short scenes are almost creepy, actually. But they are way outweighed by what is wrong, and bad, and not creepy.Olivia Williams is annoying as crap! She has the worst looking hair, and it is even a point in the movie! I got mad just looking at her stupid hair. That's not good.There is nothing new here, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but what is here, is not done very good, and that's a bad thing.The plot with the wife and the husband and the story of the house and the this and the that, could have been cool, but it is just not good enough.One scene with a sculpture and some smashing is kind of cool. Best part of the movie.

Altar is really intriguing film, and so far I have watched and felt that true horror within. First to all of my friends out there who know me and how I am it's very difficult to scare someone like me. I am sorry to say that I for one am not easily amused and most of the horrors I watch have an adverse effect on me. Personally after watching some of the horrors in the past such as Omen four I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. However the recent one that I saw called Altar was clearly no laughing matter. Far from that I felt reasonably chilled and frightened by the prospect of a sacrificial altar upon which someone died. Altar has captured my interests unlike any other horror movie in the past. Most horror films just rely on scare tactics and all sorts of unnecessary things like ghouls and ghosts. In the horror movie Altar all you need is the haunting presence of one ghost that will soon enough destroy the entire mansion that this family is temporarily living in. I would rate this movie mostly eight out of ten just because I feel like the film should've been a little bit longer.