Megan Is Missing (2011)

Too much of everything

Strictly average movie

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Only thing that freaked me out where the two pictures. And even at that, it just looked like Sam from ICarly.

I found this on Hulu and decided to give it a shot. I was expecting a Lifetime style drama about how talking to strangers on the internet is bad. What I got however was a found footage style thriller/horror film. It opens by explaining this is based on true events and then goes on to portray the footage as "real". You are told from the beginning when the girls go missing. The majority of the film is spent following the very stereotypical girls doing cliché teenage stuff. The acting goes back and forth from being painfully believable and just feeling really forced. After Megan's disappearance the creepy element really starts to kick in. There is one scene where Amy is sitting under a bridge with a teddy bear. While she is explaining why she keeps it there, a figure appears in the background behind some bushes. It is a very simple thing, but the way it was done creeped me out. From here on the movie takes a turn for the very dark and disturbing in a way that I wish I had been warned ahead of time about. The last 20ish minutes is very hard to watch and I would not recommend that anyone who is easily triggered watch this. It has been a few days since I watched this movie, and the images from the last half are still sticking with me.

I think people are being a bit overreactionary and unfair with the one star ratings. Yeah, this was low budget and the script could have been better. I thought the dialogue was a little annoying and vapid but honestly, I remember a lot of my teenager talks being on the shallow side, so maybe it's an accurate portrayal. But even though it looked a bit amateur, overall I thought it did a fair-to-good job for what it set out to do while still being entertaining. The director was up front in saying he aimed to make this a warning about online predators. Given the subject matter, this could easily have been exploitative + gratuitous. I think it refrained from doing that, so kudos. I really don't agree with those who have said the "warning" theme to the movie is just an excuse to show the raping of a fourteen year old. That scene focuses only on Amy's face the entire time, and the only viewer who would see that as exciting or as anything other than heartbreaking and angering is a sociopath already, and there are many other, sicker films that they would probably "enjoy" (blech) instead of this one. That said, the movie still banks highly on suspense and cultural morbid curiosity about predators, kidnapping, sexual assault and other violence. I don't like torture porn movies, but this one is based on true accounts,(actual pictures and footage were part of the research) and I thought it important to really get a glimpse into what those victims went through. While I thought the characters a bit shallow, (and FTR I think a lot of teenagers IRL are kind of shallow) there was decent enough backstory and character development to make me care about them. As has been said by many already, the last twenty minutes are really sad and hard to watch, but it was pretty ingenious-- for instance, showing the complete last moments of Amy's life instead of abbreviating it or cutting to different scenes. Some people have complained about how tedious it was, but this wasn't meant to be an action movie. It showed what an eternal agony Amy felt. And the very last scene is just totally heartbreaking.Deal with the cringe worthy moments. This movie is worth watching.

Do not listen to the people on here saying that this movie is terrible. First off there must be a lot of sick people on this site... because if they do not think the ending scene was terrible enough than they have something wrong with them. If you mean horrible as in the production of the movie itself than you have not seen a really horrible movie. Also the barrel part at the end actually caught me off guard and I was not expecting it at all, so to the person that said you could see it coming a mile away than speak for yourself please. Also... also the way Amy acts in the end is the way a 14 year old girl would actually act so the actors did a good job portraying the age. The acting was actually good in my opinion... I guess you guys forgot that this was supposed to be 14 year old girls and not adults. Honestly... this was a good movie, and It got its point across with having to go super overboard like "The Girl Next Door" which is a very gruesome movie that I would not want to watch again and believe me I have seen a lot of crazy movies. Also some people mentioned the hills have eyes and hostel I think but this movie blew those out of the water as far as messed up goes in my opinion. I have seen them both and they did not bother me near as much.