Honeymoon

Leigh Janiak, 2014

IMDB

1/5

The Sci-Fi/horror genre has become so offensively saturated with mostly copycat knockoffs of past classics, reusing old tropes and beating them to death. Regurgitated themes. Re-purposed cliches. Sometimes when you watch something that feels like a huge waste of your time, making you think that maybe its all been done before. That maybe there aren't any new ideas in this genre. But then every now and then, something will float to the surface. Something will stand out. Films like The Conjuring, The Cabin in the Woods or Insidious will appear and it gives us all hope. It gives us hope that maybe there can be new things done with the seemingly forlorn genre.

Unfortunately, Honeymoon doesn't fall into this category of refreshing and unique horror films that are trying new things. Instead it falls into that category of pretty good acting spoiled by an awful script and amateur direction. Janiak tries to make too much with too little here. This one can be filed under the category of predictably stagnant alien films. It's a bit irritating too, because you are likely delighted to see Rose Leslie on screen after seeing her in Game of Thrones or Downton Abbey. She has already proven herself a good actress while working with good material. But she doesn't have a whole lot to work with here. In fact, her Bea character and husband Paul (Harry Treadaway) characters are actually quite annoying. You spend the first 20 minutes of the film watching them groping each other like a couple of spider monkeys. To be expected on ones honeymoon. But we aren't going into this movie hoping to spectate a weekend of lovemaking. That's another kind of movie that we can watch some other time. That one will probably be better directed as well. Because you will have two minutes of foreplay and casual dialogue and they will get down to business. Honeymoon takes a lot of time getting to where it wants to, when most of the audience will probably know where it's going the entire time. The decision making on the parts of Paul's character are frustrating. The most obvious of them all is his inability to get Bea in the car and away from the cabin. Her condition continues to decline, his solution is to fondle her more and tell her how much he misses her. His character seems to be desperately horny, like he should have been in Deadgirl and not Honeymoon. Honeymoon feels like a weak ripoff of a Stephen King story with too much build-up and an insufficient reveal.