Oculus has plenty going for it but fails at being scary

Director uses a surplus of confusing and excessive bloody scenes

The film “Oculus” is directed by Mike Flanagan and written by Flanagan and Jeff Howard. The genres of this movie are horror and mystery. The Motion Pictures Rating give this film and R rating for terror, violence, disturbing images and language.

The movie made a box office of five-million dollars and its release date was April 11, 2014. Rotten Tomatoes give it a Tomatometer of 73 percent while IMDb gives it a 61 Metascore.

Watching the trailer of the Oculus was scary to me and I couldn’t look the other way around. The trailer gives an insight into what you can see from behind your mirror.

When I started to watch the film I had to skip some parts. The problem with the beginning of the film is it felt kind of slow when I was being introduced to the characters.

If the director found a different way of introducing the characters in a quick and timid matter, then it wouldn’t be necessary for me to skip some parts of the film. Another problem I had with the movie were the cliches of finding eerie photos from the library.

Do you know how many times they showed random photos of being dead from the mirror? Multiple times and I started to lose some interest in the film, as they should have removed some of these photos and focused on the film.

Anyway, the film goes back to the time where we are introduced to the main characters as young kids. It starts with father viewing the computer as he was doing that. He is shown pulling off a bandage when he didn’t.

This part was confusing until he is using a staple remover on his finger. This part had lots of blood and was hard for me to watch. Then the film goes back to the present of the character where we are introduced on their belief system. The brother is mostly a science guy while his sister is a ghost believer.

Now, the movie decided to go back in time to introduce the mother. I thought this part was a bit cliche of going back and forth with the times.

I wished the directed focused on one side of the story instead of going back and forth. The mother and kids are at a table sitting down waiting for their father to come back.

The mother was drinking wine and began to get with her husband since she knows that he was cheating on her with another woman. The next scenes had some cliches that made me skip a lot of parts of the film. First off it shows the woman being possessed by the ancient mirror.

The way the film fails to explain how they get the mirror is confusing. Then it shows the kids running towards their mother since they heard a scream.

Both the main characters split up to find their mother, which was a bad idea for the kids to do in this film.

As the brother found his mother he was shocked and scared of his mother. It took about five seconds for the mother to do something scary and then the father comes in the house. He does the same thing his son did when he saw his mother.

They both began to run away from their mother until their father calls them back downstairs. They’re found there dead on the ground and another long and boring scene came after.

Now, the film was getting scary, but I had to skip some parts since some of the scenes were not too scary.

Towards the end of the film, the brother and sister are shown destroying the mirror. However, it showed the sister standing right beside the mirror killing her.

But the mirror is master of illusion, so we are not sure if the mirror is broken. Then we are shown the cops arresting the brother stating that he didn’t kill his parents. It was the mirror that killed his parents.

This film was fun and scary to watch, but I had two problems. One, why did the trailer do a better job of scaring audiences?

The director of the film should have focused the trailer on making it scary and introducing the character in a quick manner.

Two, was choking a symbol in this movie? It didn’t explain it, but it was ridiculous seeing people being choked by random people.

It even showed them being chocked in five seconds and being released afterward. The creators of the film should have done a better job instead of using choking as a scary element.