Purely Joyful Movie!

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Blistering performances.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

You've got two choices,1. Watch, The Shining, a classic horror with great acting, directing and inspired cinematography. Or, 2. You can watch, Altar, which is literally a rip-off of that movie which also manages to misunderstand everything that made that movie brilliant and combines that ignorance with bad acting, bad directing and a poor script.I would leave it there but unfortunately these reviews have to be ten lines minimum, so although I'm tempted to just write...'Ripping off a superior directors work makes Altar a dull movie' ...over and over again, I'll just add this;Some still shots of the Gothic English landscape in this movie are quite nice to look at, but nothing about this film, not even that, is original, and there was no point I can think of that would have justified spending the money to make this motion picture. The money would have been better spent on...well...anything else! So to conclude, before watching Altar, I highly recommend you 'Alter' your mind...eh?...see what I did there?

This is a bad movie. When I knew the cast, I thought it had to be good. Experienced actors with a great curriculum of good movies. Well, it started out very bad and it gets worse till the end. A lot of clichés. The same and old ones that everybody saw in thousand of other horror type movies. Bad acting, which surprised me. It seemed that Mathew was not there at all....he was around the movie scene and stopped a while to make some filming. Didn't feel him at all. The plot, it's old and the same one, ever and ever again. The effects are bad and didn't scare one bit. Not even the slamming doors, or the sounds...nothing is capable of scare in this picture. My question is: why someone bothers to do a movie like thousands of other? and why did the actors accept being part of this? I really don't understand. There are a lot of stupid scenes also. It's really not good enough to spend time watching.

There's an inkling feeling when watching Altar that it's nearly identical with other horror movies. The isolated moor seems like the one in The Woman in Black, its haunting resembles The Shining or even Poltergeist at some point with the CG. It presents a few dreadful scenes only to lose its effectiveness as audience realizes the shoddy effect and unimaginative scare.A woman is hired to do restoration on an ancient site. She brought her family along and needless to say, the site has a troubled past. Between the eerie occurrence before and increasingly haunting presence, The plot follows a strict formulaic premise and it brings too many elements, it becomes burdensome at times. The most dubious bit is how this entity is presented.Altar wants to give many subplots of the horror came to be, but it's done in sloppy fashion. There are too many strange developments, especially with the possession gimmick. Acting and script can barely handle the weighty sporadic subjects, and it's just fumbling from one horror attempt to another.Its location is pretty nice, gloomy and practically screaming horror. It's already a good vista, but the movie spends too much on bantering. Not to mention it also takes some flaws from other horror movies like the clueless characters or overly cryptic sacrificial ritual. The worse is its use of CGI, what could have been a decent terror is decreased to silly overlapping images like scenes from old TV show.Altar scrounges many aspects from other movies of the genre, it's eventually overwhelmed by the cumbersome direction and doesn't even produce the same thrill it's inspired from.

A young family move to an isolated house which the mother has been hired to restore only to discover that presences still linger casting a hold over her artist sculpturing husband. Taking a leaf from a James Herbert novel and channelling countless haunted films Altar is an effective ghost story chiller, however, what sets director/writer Nick Willing's offering apart are the practical and some special effects which have an optical natural feel as opposed to the usual ineffective blatant CGI. Willing delivers some genuinely eerie visuals and creepy moments, this coupled with a great score and on location shoot help give some credence and atmosphere to the proceedings. Matthew Modine's Hamilton sports a Shining Jack Torrence like woollen jumper (the writer character is replaced here by an artist) and mimics Torrence's transformation (although quite speedy) still Modine gives an intense performance. Both the younger actors are effective, actress Antonia Clarke is notable as Penny. Olivia Williams gives convincing performance which complements the naturalistic writing and setting. While it breaks no new ground in terms of ghost stories or twist endings it's a solid old school British horror.