The Caretaker (2016)
Written By: FZ
Edited By: Grave Reviews Staff
Film Information
Director: Jeff Prugh
Producer: Jonathan M. Black, James Huntsman, et. al.
Screenwriter: Jeremy Robinson
Date Released: September 30, 2016
Cast:
Meegan Warner as Mallorie
Sondra Blake as Birdie
Sean Martini as August
Barry Jenner as Rawdilly
Chanel Celaya as Taylor
Rating = 3/5 Graves
***May contain some spoilers***
Synopsis
This is a story of a young woman who returns home to care for her gravely ill grandmother, only to begin sleepwalking, envisioning spirits and uncovering dark secrets in her family’s past.
Gore Factor
The Caretaker is a creepy tale with some nice plot developments and a crazy old lady at the center of it all. The old lady is a witch and she’s killing the people that try to take over her life. Are you a fan of jump scares? Well, this movie lives and dies by its jump scares.
The Grave Review
The Caretaker (2016) is a great story with great characters who can carry a movie. There’s no huge budget behind this movie, but you won’t think about that while watching it. Both sound and images are crisp, so your focus will remain on the story.
Also, they manage to give some real insight to several of the characters, which is no small feat for a movie with a runtime of just 80 minutes. Then again, this is exactly what’s possible, when you take away all the stereotypical scenes.
Sondra Blake has one of the best performances in the movie. With a good story, interesting characters and perfect pace of The Caretaker, it is enough to watch this movie for Sondra Blake. She can make a scene where she’s just dancing around in some sort of trance, and one can watched that for the longest time. She is so damn intense and honest. She’s the biggest sweetheart towards her granddaughter, Mallorie, while almost hissing at the boyfriend. And she’s not some creeper pretending to like him, when Mallorie is there. She’s brutal and direct all the time.
Even though Sondra Blake is very memorable, the rest of the cast is amazing as well.
The movie itself never quite go for broke, content to maintain a decent level of interest with the mystery of what terrible things happened in the house back in Mallorie’s unremembered past, what secrets are locked away in the old dark attic, and other stuff about spells and seances and such.
Ultimately, it is the sense of genuine fear we anticipate and desire but which the film is never quite able to pull off. The elements are all there for an experience like that of, say, The Others, a movie that chilled us to the bone because it knew just how to pull our strings.
The story does make one last stops-out attempt to end things with a bang, or rather a scream, but even this final twist is merely noteworthy rather than chilling.
While far from perfect, The Caretaker is a nice film with plenty to enjoy and ends up being more than impressive than the typical movies that are thrown at genre fans.
For the foregoing reasons, Grave Reviews give The Caretaker (2016) three graves out of five graves.
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