The Reenactment

I love the horror genre and will lower my standards quite a bit for any "haunted house" movie, but this movie is so boring that I started folding laundry while watching it and eventually became more involved with find missing socks and forgot the movie was on.

Intrigued by the inclusion of Tony Todd, I popped it on and I'm glad I did. Once you make it through some of the earlier, sillier scenes and the too clever by half nods to Unsolved Mysteries and 90s nostalgia in general (though Todd does shine embracing his comedic side as the host of the show), you see the film really find it's footing as a meditation (albeit an exceptionally violent one) on generational trauma and the commodification of tragedy by the mass media. Ford definitely shows some chops for a first time filmmaker, as there's a tastefulness to the technical aspects of the film that's unfortunately lacking in the script and some of the performances. I'd highly recommend this as a fun indie horror film, and a must see if you're a Tony Todd fan.

Needless to say that the main reason for why I opted to sit down and watch this 2021 horror movie that I had never even heard about was because the movie had Tony Todd on the cast list. I can't claim to say that writers Andrew Ford and Eli Osman managed to put together a rather interesting or entertaining script and storyline for "The Reenactment". In fact, the movie was so utterly boring and slow paced that I just gave up after 27 minutes of virtually nothing happening. Talk about a horror movie being a swing and a miss. And it certainly didn't help one bit that the character gallery in "The Reenactment" was about as interesting as watching sand running through an hourglass. In fact, I didn't even care one bit about any of the characters that I managed to see in the excruciating 27 minutes of torment that I sat through. Calling "The Reenactment" a horror movie might be stretching it quite far, unless you consider a void storyline as being sufficient to be labelled horror. The acting performances in "The Reenactment" were as bland and irrelevant as the script and storyline. And I do think that this has to be an all-time low for Tony Todd. Do yourself a favor and stay well clear of "The Reenactment", because it simply isn't worth the time, money or effort. This movie is not something I would recommend to anyone. And the best thing about the entire ordeal, aside from Tony Todd's name being there, was the movie's poster/cover. Kind of ironic that one of the companies working on this movie was named Topnotch Entertainment Corp. My rating of "The Reenactment" lands on a one out of ten stars.