Halloween Film Frightstival Day 21: Identity (2003)
A gun in the first act, that totally won’t come back to be important at the end /s
I really love murder stories where you have a select cast of characters and the murderer can’t be anyone else, although being set in the middle of nowhere desert reminds me of The Hills Have Eyes which makes me feel like Leatherface is gonna pop out and chop everyone up even though I know the storytelling is saying no one else can show up
The Ray Liotta cop character isn’t actually a cop, calling it now
This is just an Agatha Christie slasher which doesn’t sound like it should be a thing yet still works
Well that’s one way to make an orphan
I feel like every one of these characters has something to do with each other in some way and there’s gonna be a series of insane reveals because there’s so much going on (and also because this is clearly modernized And Then There Were None)
It was effective enough as a horror movie but now I have the ick for the entire thing because I refuse to entertain the demonization of mental health conditions. People with dissociative disorders are not bad. And I’m mad that it was kind of an interesting twist and then another good twist at the end.
This might be my first thumbs down of the month, not because it was bad, the acting was fine, it was engaging, but because the premise is gross. It’s disappointing because I wanted to like it and I did until the end, but I guess at least if they’re going to use the murderous alter trope, at least they did it differently than the other examples of that trope? Like if I don’t think about the implications of media demonizing mental health, it was actually an interesting twist on the trope, but I can’t not think about that
