The Horsemen

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
3.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
4/10

Year released: 2009
Runtime: 90 minutes
IMDB page: here

Things looked so promising, but ultimately it's so disappointing. Yeah, take that, you serious-artsy-intriguing-horror-movie wannabe!

Plot: A widower cop with 2 sons, Aidan (Dennis Quaid)'s family life isn't doing so hot. He's always overworked and doesn't have the time to take care of his kids, who have grown quite distant from him after his wife's death, especially the older, teenaged Alex (Lou Taylor Pucci). Aidan gets a particularly nasty case of ritualistic killing, where the victim, a mother of 3, was hung up by hooks and killed by lung punctures and her unborn baby was taken out of her. The words "COME AND SEE" were spraypainted on 4 walls in the room. A few days later, a victim is found dead in a similar way, hanging by hooks dug into the body. Evidence shows there are multiple people present at the scene...

Cast: Dennis Quaid is quite bland. But Ziyi Zhang does play a psycho Asian adopted daughter of the 1st victim. She has always had that mean look in her eyes suitable for playing a villain, so this fits her pretty nicely. Her accent is a bit painful at times, but she manages to do the whole thing in English. Lou Pucci's tortured Alex is remarkably poignant to watch.

Script: Has a very intriguing idea on hand, but mostly ruins it. The gist is that the serial ritual killers are imitating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death), colour themes symbols (sword, weighing scale, etc) included. But the dialogue and the ending is pretty lame... the identity of the final killer was kind of predictable.

Production: Lots of fake blood, lots of agony in death... but most of those scenes have little weight or passion in them. As horror movies go, this one doesn't incite any fear in you... just a slight disgust that you are actually wasting your time watching it.

So, yeah, not awesome in my book. I started watching with no idea what it would be about, then got pretty excited that it's gonna be a very interesting serial killer mystery with lots of symbolism... then got real disappointed that nothing really comes together. Definitely skippable.