my thoughts on.... 'The Baby's Room aka La habitación del niño'

Here's another installment in my recent Spanish horror film-athon. This particular one was another part of the 'Six Films To Keep You Awake' series. I actually had started this one previously, but turned it off because I wasn't in a good place at the time to watch it. The first, like, 45 minutes are pretty intense.... the rest of it, not so much. I don't know what happened with this that they made the decision to go down the tired and boring route, but they did. This movie had a lot of potential and it's not that the rest of it wasn't original, it just didn't feel like anything new at all. This movie felt like a bad re-run of 'The Twilight Zone', but in Spanish. If it was in black and white, I honestly would have thought it was something from another time. I kept hoping that it would get better and a movie that's just shortly over an hour long, it didn't give it much time to be screwed up. Somehow, the director managed it. Now I just feel like I'm harping on it and to be fair, it had its good points. But before I get to that:

Our story opens on some children playing by an old building. It appears that they're playing hide and seek and one of the kids ends up inside the building. Something terrible happens and when he comes out, he's not the same. Fast forward to the present day and a young family is moving into the aforementioned house. They have a little baby and are still in the early stages of parenthood. The sister of baby's father drops off some gently used baby items, which includes a monitor. During the night, the father hears some breathing besides the baby and after going into the room he becomes paranoid that someone else has been in their home. His solution is to head down to the local baby store and pick up a video monitor. What happens over the next several nights freaked me the 'F' out. A man with glowing eyes keeps appearing on the monitor. The police can't figure out what's going on and so the couple install a security system. Nothing seems to keep the man out of the house and the father slowly begins to descend into maddness. His wife leaves with the baby and the father learns the terrible secret behind the man in the house and what's been happening. The rest is, well.... the rest.

So what's good about this movie? The ambiance, the ghostly appearance of the man in the baby's room and the early part of the story itself. It's very well done and accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. It creates a sense of fear and dread and it honestly scared me. The idea of your baby being watched at night by a creepy man with glowing eyes is frightening. And add to the fact that no one can figure out how he's getting in the home and how no one is seeing him come or go is even scarier yet. That is the good aspects. What happens in the second and third act of the movie involves time and space, alternate realities and some bullcrap that just doesn't belong in a ghost story. I can't recommend that you watch this movie, there is so many other ghost stories out there that are more effective and better made. Ah well....

This movie, in my book, built up a really strong case in the beginning for a good movie, that I ended up giving it 3 out of 5 stars. Maybe if you just turn it off after the first part of the second act? That way you get all of the good stuff and none of the bad. That's kind of the way it is with a lot of movies being made out there today. It's like the folks in the film industry come up with an idea and then build a movie around it, but leave the script writing to some third grader in order to save costs. So what starts off really strong with that initial idea that got the movie greenlighted in the first place, ends up being ruined by whoever gets their hands on it after the fact. At some point, the audience will rise up and retake control of the industry. It's already started with the rise of cheap, good quality cameras and the internet. So either the movie making machine in Hollywood will listen to the demands of the public or the public will continue to grow it's own Hollywood system and everything will go the way that music is already headed. Either way, the audience will eventually be the winners and I'll have a lot tougher time deciding which movies are the good ones, as they'll all be high quality. That's all I have to say about that.

If you like this, check out: '[REC]', 'To Let aka Para entrar a vivir' and '[REC]2'

(This is the trailer for the '6 Films To Keep You Awake' series, of which.... 'The Baby's Room aka La habitación del niño' is a part of.)