Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

crawdad-6 This movie seems to owe a huge debt to Final Destination, in that the film is primarily about horrible fate hunting down a group of teens one-by-one.I found the characters even more cardboard-cutout than those in F.D. Main difference is that here the threat is personified, but the boogity stays so undeveloped that this is a weakness. The father should have been developed quite a bit more, and the landlord could have been a very interesting pivot point for the story, instead of serving merely as a red herring or distraction.The fact that the ending was actually an ending, rather than a Hollywood sequel-tease was nice, however.Watchable, but only just. If, however, you go all weak-kneed over mush-moufed British accents, you might like it more than I did.

Paul Andrews Long Time Dead opens to a caption that informs us that we're in 'Morocco 1979' where a group of people are holding a séance which gets out of hand when a fire demon called a Djinn appears & supposedly kills everyone... Long Time Dead then cuts to present day London where four house-mates, Rob (Joe Absolom), Liam (Alex Newman), Webster (Lukas Haas) & Stella (Lara Belmont) are planning to go out for the night. They hook up with their soon to be new house-mate the drug dealing Joe (Mel Raido) & three friends, Lucy (Marsha Thomason), Spencer (James Hillier) & Liam's girlfriend Annie (Melanie Gutteridge). While sitting around at a club they begin to have a discussion on what the biggest buzz in life is, from this rather innocent sounding topic the subject of séance's is brought up & for some reason they all decide to hold one. They find a suitable venue which appears to be in attic space above the club & begin, unfortunately they release the fire demon Djinn which spells the words 'ALL DIE' out on the Ouija board which freaks them all out, as it would I suppose. Shortly after Annie dies in an accident & her body has burns on it, the remaining member's of the group feel something is wrong & do some research which leads to some unexpected answers & the discovery that maybe not everyone is as they appear or who they claim. As more of the friends continue to die in accidents a way must be found to send the evil Djinn back before it completes it's mission to kill all those who summoned it...Directed Adam Marcus I thought that this English & French co-production was a somewhat modest & undemanding way to pass 90 odd minutes. The script by Eitan Arrusi, Chris Baker, Daniel Bronzite & Andy Day really isn't anything special & I can't quite believe it took four writers to come up with this. Generally speaking Long Time Dead is rather slow & uneventful & the characters are so bland & similar with most of them looking & sounding exactly the same & the only one's I could really distinguish between are Lucy because she's black & Joe because of his hair! Everyone else barely registered with me & that made it very hard to care about anyone or anything, oh & they're an unlikeable bunch of teenage stereotypes as well which didn't help the film. The script also features various lapses of logic, at the end I just couldn't stop thinking that it was a bit of a coincidence that a bunch of kids would just happen to hold a séance & summon the exact same demon that their landlord & one of their Father's did years earlier, a fact which they only discover later on in the film. There is another scene in particular I keep thinking about that sums Long Time Dead & it's silly script up, when two people break into a police guarded house & turn the lights on only for the police officer on guard to be conveniently looking in the opposite direction & only looking back at the house literally seconds after the lights have been turned off. I also hated the scare tactic's that director Marcus employed, I mean people hearing noises only to have one of their 'friends' grab their shoulder & apologise for scaring them. What do these people think will happen exactly? Can't they just call out & say who it is that's creeping around in the shadows? Long Time Dead uses this clichéd & lazy technique on a number of increasingly annoying occasions. There are also plenty of cheap demon point-of-view shots which presumably help save money by not having to show the demon itself. On the positive side it tells it's story well enough I suppose & while it's not exceptional Long Time Dead is a well made film generally speaking. I also liked the ending where the Djinn appears to win, it's nice not to have a happy sugar coated ending for a change. Long Time Dead is one of those horror films that has nothing really wrong with it & entertains to a certain extent but suffers by being just so average a few script problems that should have been ironed out especially since four people worked on the thing. The gore quotient is sadly lacking with nothing more graphic than a few splashes of blood & someone being burnt. As for the Djinn itself the best the filmmakers could come up with are some CGI demon eyes on an ordinary actor. There's no sex or nudity either but there is some swearing & drug usage which the film treats lightly & doesn't say is right but neither does it say it is wrong just that it's a normal teenage thing to do. Overall I thought Long Time Dead was a slightly below average horror that didn't do much for me but at the same time I have seen much worse & at least it kept me watching until the end. Don't spend any sort of money on it but if you can catch it on TV for free & there's nothing else on then it's probably just about worth an hour & a half of your time, but only just.

BloodTheTelepathicDog A group of disaffectionate youths play with a Ouija board, and unleash a murderous Djinn. The plot is used often, but there are plenty of thrills and chills, and the darkness adds to the terror.Many posters enjoy this film because it is a European horror, but there is absolutely nothing distinguishing this from American horrors, albeit the accents.There aren't any clever twists, unless you want to count the ending, but still, that was all too obvious. Lukas Haas, of Witness fame, and Alec Newman(who guest starred on an episode of Tru Calling) where the only recognizable faces in this film.What irks me the most about this film, was that the most attractive cast member, and also one of the more talented, was the first to die. In movies like this, you have to keep the eye candy around for awhile.For a superior European horror film, check out Lighthouse with James Purefoy and Rachel Shelley.

Brandt Sponseller A random group of young adults who are some combination of roommates/friends takes time out from their busy partying schedule to play with an improvised Ouija board, when they accidentally call forth a djinn who tells them that they will all die.Long Time Dead is quite a mess, made all the more frustrating by occasional flashes of competence. It couldn't have helped that that a veritable army of writers--seven credited in all--worked on the story and script, including director Marcus Adams.After a brief prologue set in the late 1970s in Morocco which was far more promising than most of the film proper, we begin meeting our bloated cast of heroes. There are eight of them, maybe all living in the same building or apartment, except for Lucy (Marsha Thomason), who appears to be living on a boat near the building. If I sound unsure, it's because Adams is not able to clearly establish the characters, their relationships to one another, or the relationships of one location to another. It doesn't help that a few of the five males look alike, and they all dress alike. Neither does it help that as the film progresses, various characters arbitrarily appear and disappear for random lengths of time. That fact is indicative of the pacing problems that plague the film on many levels.It's not often very clear why any characters are doing whatever they happen to be doing at a given moment. Most of the plot seems like an excuse to put characters in very stereotypical horror/thriller scenarios, where they slowly walk around an environment frightened, becoming startled in various ways until finally some unseen thing kills them. These scenes are often competent, and occasionally they're good, but in the context of the film, they have little dramatic impact. Much of Long Time Dead plays more like a sample reel of "scare scenes"; it has little coherency as a story.A big problem is that the chief villain is never clearly shown, explained or given any rules to follow. For most of the film, the villain is invisible. Invisible villains are usually a problem, and often indicate deficiencies in budget and/or imagination. Oddly, by the end, there is a concrete villain and the film has devolved into a fairly stock thriller, where we have to guess whom the possessed cast member is.Although the story has promise, and the ending is somewhat of an improvement, even though it never rises above the cliché, Long Time Dead is too burdened with severe flaws in direction, cinematography (the film is frequently far too dark) and performances to merit a recommendation. I ended up granting a 4 (equivalent to a "high F" letter grade) because of the adequacy of some of the "scare" and death scenes, the good ideas in the backstory, and the slightly more engaging climax. The film would have been much better if the prologue and the subsequent events with Becker and the one character's father who ended up in a mental institution had been the focus, but alas, it was not to be. Let's hope Adams fares better the next time around.