Cold Crap Manor (Cold Creek Manor (DVD))

Member Name: stevepeto

Product:	Cold Creek Manor (DVD)
Date:	07/12/07 (183 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The House

Disadvantages: Everything Else

>>>Movie<<<
Cooper Tilson (Dennis Quiad), his wife leah (Sharon Stone) and their two children live smack bang in the middle of New York City. Leah is a company executive and Cooper makes documentaries for a living. Life is fairly fast paced and hectic what with their work lives and where they live. After a minor accident involving one of the children, they decide enough is enough and they move out of the big bad city out into the (apparently) idyllic countryside, they find a dilapidated old manor house and decide that they want to make it their dream home, so they move in.

In the house they find all sorts of memorabilia from the previous owners including photographs and videos, Cooper being a documentary maker decides to develop a timeline of the previous family with the information that he has found in the house. We don't have to wait long before we meet Dale Massie (Stephen Dorff) and Cooper offers him a job. This is where I have my first problem with the film. The whole situation of how they come to meet Dale would set alarms bells ringing in my head, even Cooper and Leah are looking concerned about finding a stranger in their house, yet they offer the man a job, that just doesn't sit right with me.

After a while Cooper has his suspicions that all is not well with Dale and Dale leaves the job. Massie takes this badly and begins to target the family for revenge and this is pretty much the theme for the rest of the movie all the way up to its (anti) climax.

Quiad and Stone's characters are wooden and don't convince, their characters make bad decisions on a regular basis and add little in the way of credibility to this movie. Stephen Dorff plays a mediocre bad guy, but the audience will "know" he is the bad guy of the film as soon as they see him, which spoils any attempt at suspense later in the film, his physique being his best contribution to the movie.

This is a shame as the creepy setting. Although clichéd, would have made a great location for a film of this nature, all the nooks and crannies of a large house in the countryside is just crying out for some suspenseful moments in order to keep us on the edge of our seats. Even the blurb on the back of the case indicates that this will be a decent film. However it was not to be, it is very slow to take off, and when it does, it doesn't get fair off the ground before crashing down again, the acting is lame for the most part and one dimensional, there are no "make you jump" surprises and certainly no thrill in this no brainer alleged thriller.

>>>Overall<<<

The movie just didn't really do it for me, too slow, too predictable and not enough thrill for a thriller, the highlight of the movies is Christopher Plummer as Dale's mean cherry chocolate eating daddy, and the star of the movie is the house, I would love to own it. I certainly cannot recommend Cold Creek Manor it is more of a Completely Crap Movie.

This review is all of my own work, original published here - http://www.digitallard.com/moviereview/128/index.h tm by me.

Summary: see review for overall summary