Am I Missing Something?

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

THE REEDS is another entirely predictable horror yarn, set somewhat incongruously in the Norfolk Broads (for anyone who's ever been to the broads, you'll know they look nothing like the desolate, atmospheric place shown in this film). The cast are a group of uninteresting youths who run afoul of a dark secret, and the viewer's patience will be tested early on by the sheer banality of it all.The problem with films like THE REEDS is that they copy rather than innovate. So pretty much everything that you see taking place on screen here has been done before, and better too. The lines of dialogue are dull and lack spirit, and the cast give strictly ordinary performances with none standing out. The only person I recognised was Geoff Bell (COMEDOWN), stuck in one of those creepy elder type roles. Elsewhere, the film offers some bloodshed, a lot of screaming, and plenty of stuff shot in the dark to disguise the low budget. It's not very interesting.

I'd say this film is more of a puzzling suspense film than a horror flick. It's a rather intelligently-written film, but it still didn't completely wow me. Again, the typical handful of young adults, this time in the setting of taking a boat through some reedy marsh-like area of the UK. For a long time, the entire movie feels like a jigsaw puzzle. We're shown glimpses of the whole, but we still can only guess what they all fit together to finally mean.Is it a basic madman slasher thing? Are they being haunted by ghosts? Dopplegangers? Ah, it's some weird temporal flux thing...but still, that only explains a piece of the overall mystery. Who's the guy in the hood with the gun? What's his beef exactly? This movie will do a good job for a lot of people to unsettle them because the audience keeps having to ask these questions. And as we're calmly asking questions, our main protagonists are panicking here and there at what they don't understand. So much of the suffering and death comes from this really wonderful plot device: when you experience something you don't understand, the worse part of you wants to panic. When you panic, you're prone to make bad decisions. When you make bad decisions, bad things happen and people get hurt. The fact that so many of our main characters just screwed themselves over because of this speaks to me of relatively smarter storywriting.However, this film isn't without its flaws. I said a lot of people would be unsettled by the nature of this film's storyline, but not me. Again, it felt more like a mystery movie than a horror flick, and the climax, while it still puts together enough of the pieces to satisfy us, didn't leave me feeling like much was really resolved. There's no real denouement, especially as we are led to believe with the final scene that the couple who "escaped" get caught back at the beginning of the entire temporal loop that messed them all up in the first place. Give a try, though; you might enjoy it.

Rarely do I ever give a movie 1 star. I've seen some truly awful crap that I gave at least 2 or 3 stars for effort. But maybe that's the problem with The Reeds...it's not trying. At all. The only effort I could see going into this film was the attempt to cobble the whole mess of crap together at the end, and even at that it failed miserably. I have to agree with another reviewer who compared it to Triangle, but perhaps because I watched that only a few months ago so it happens to be somewhat fresh in my mind. But the big difference is that Triangle managed to keep it's warping of time linear whereas The Reeds just sort of went "screw it...it doesn't need to make sense". To make matters worse, it was presented as part of 2010's Afterdark Horrorfest...a festival that usually produces movies that are at least decent.The plot is almost pointless to explain. A group of friends takes a boat out onto...a lake or something. They become marooned and start dying in truly ludicrous ways. Then things become all weird with the time line and past events are played over again...sometimes involving the main characters and sometimes not. Again, just a random mash-up of crap that I guess is supposed to be spooky or something. Then it ends on a completely unrelated note that might as well have been a different movie. Nothing here is redeeming. Not the story, direction, cinematography, acting...nothing. Ditch this trash.

This movie could've been called enigma - in a positive way - a supernatural low-budget horror that takes thought to work out what's happening to who and why once past the half-way mark. The story?Five or six guys and gals from London go on a jaunt on the canals and watery inlets of Norfolk - think Everglades without the crocs - and slowly discover that as the movie straplines go, 'there's something in the reeds' and 'they can play tricks on you.'Re what it is and why the guys & gals need to be worried we keep guessing, guessing some more, and the blood just keeps flowing. Maybe there's too much guesswork for some but the lead girl pulls off the plot-moves passably well and the others make it a totally bearable experience, specially the first half of the movie. My humble analysis is that 90% of people will like the first half of the movie, and only 50% will like the second: I liked it enough to comment and give a review but then I don't like movies with stars and nothing to say. This had something to say and even though it may have tied itself up in Gordian knots it's worth a 6 or 7.