Not Alone (2015)

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is a confusing mess by design. Ellie Rose's mom (Kika Mirylees) changed when she was a child. She has a sister Chloe (Alexandra Moen) who apparently mom liked best. Ellie (Lucy Benjamin) has flashbacks to her husband Frank (Bill Ward) apparently slapping her and causing a miscarriage, although the flashbacks hide faces. Then there was the night her and Chloe go to visit mom and she finds blood everywhere, and if you missed that flashback, wait as it is repeated as it takes up half the film.As I watched the film I was confused as to what was flashback, what was real and what was the present, and what was a dream. In the end things did come together and the imagery made sense. I can even say it was smartly done for what they wanted to do. However the fact is I struggled through the film and wasn't entertained seeing the same faceless scenes repeated over and over. Nice era recreation. Did they have underground power lines to remote areas?Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

I have seen worse movies but this one was a waste of time and money for those who made it and those who took the time to rent, buy, or see this movie. First of all it starts in the heat of the moment of blood and gore. Then it moves to this house in the middle of nowhere with one of the girls in the first scene and it takes a good 20-30 minutes for ANY lines to be spoken. All the while you are watching the same 4 scenes play over and over again with this broad roaming around this house that you have no idea who or where it is or what the hell happened in the scene that took place beforehand. Then when the movie FINALLY decides to progress nothing makes sense and the main plot point is painfully obvious. Honestly, I wish I could take back the time I wasted watching this movie and perhaps put it into watching Twilight again.

I'm not a person that goes online to write movie reviews, but this movie is so terrible that I felt obligated to write a review for others so they don't waste their time or money on this garbage movie. This is without a doubt the worst movie I've ever seen in my lifetime. It is so beyond boring, and no part of the movie makes ANY sense whatsoever. The budget on this movie must have been like $1,000 no joke. To get the movie to a normal running time they had to repeat multiple scenes over and over as filler to waste time and confuse the viewer even further. Anyone involved with the making of this worthless POS movie should be ashamed. A child with a camcorder could make a better movie than this worthless waste. By a long stretch one of the most boring, generic, pointless, confusing, most low budget films that exist.

As far as I can tell from my extensive research (10 minutes on IMDb), this is the first movie in which Lucy Benjamin has appeared. She is more well known in the UK for her role as Lisa Fowler in the soap opera Eastenders ('oy mate, you been shafting my sister, innit?' etc.). She has also acted in other British TV soaps, sitcoms and series. She is a reasonably good actress, so I don't think the blame can be laid on her for this stonker of a movie. Instead, I think we have to point a finger (or two) at director/writer Tristan Versluis. He has also directed a handful of other movies, but his main involvement in movies and TV series has been for make-up, including top-rating shows like Game of Thrones. Anyways, Not Alone (a.k.a. 'The Haunting of Ellie Rose') is badly written and poorly directed. It is predictable and clichéd, and, apart (possibly) from the main role, seriously lacks character development - as we all know, if you can't empathize with any of the main characters, a movie will not hold your attention or stir your emotions (for instance, horror films are supposed to be scary...). On the positive side, some of the photography and filming is very good quality, but the low budget is clearly reflected in the limited locations, poor costuming, limited soundtrack, and dodgy 'special effects'. Versluis does well in the make-up department (where his experience lies) - Ellie Rose's broken wrist is gruesomely real, as are the dead bodies sitting around the kitchen table. But somewhere around the start of the third and final stage of this movie, the viewer begins to realize that there are no surprising twists in store, and that they have just wasted 80 minutes of their life. Let's hope Lucy Benjamin gets offered work in better movies, and that Versluis' writing and directing improves - because both show promise and could have done better. So, unless, as some of us do, you have an inexplicable attraction to B-movies, I advise you to skip this movie and look for a better horror film - about one in 10 of 2015's horror films were watchable, which is a fairly good rate.