Winter Lily (1998)

Slow, but has it's good points

Many people would find this movie horrible, but what you have to realize is what it is before watching it. This movie is very strange and original, and it is an independant film. It is slow and the acting is not top par, but it was nonetheless interesting to me. It has a very "creepy" effect to it that just kind of makes you feel weird, which most horror movies do not. To watch this movie you must have patience and an open mind. If you want a more stereotypical good horror film you should not be watching this. June 14, 2006

Buy Anything Else!!!!

Looking for a horror story? Looking for a good movie? Looking for a literate plot, intelligent characters and a few fun thrills? Then choose almost anything else at random from the DVD list and you will have found a better movie, guaranteed.

Our hero, Clive, is a photographer because he found his Dad's camera and thought he should give it a try. He stays at a bed and breakfast run by the looniest innkeeper this side of Norman Bates. (Anyone else would have run off the minute this crazy lady answered the door.) The innkeeper's daughter, seen in photos around the house, suffers from diabetes and other arcane disorders that keep her out of the hero's line of vision, but not out of his mind. He falls in love with her thru her morbid diary jottings. (He just happens to find the diary whilst snooping in the lounge.) Little Lily has suffocating parents and a taste for older men. We are led to believe we are dealing with a ghost. Or perhaps something beyond the natural. Clive snoops. Lily's diary spills her secrets. Lily's mother giggles. Clive wanders over the landscape. We get bored. The solution, when it comes, is a shock only to Clive. What happens after is sordid and makes Clive even less sympathetic than he was at the start. And the finale which (spoiler! spoiler! spoiler!) leaves everyone dead is simply lazy writing. Not everyone can be Robert Bloch, but this writer didn't even try to put an original spin on Bloch.

The "horror" here is that someone marketed this flick. (The bigger horror is that I was sucked in to buying it based on a few rave reviews from various sources.)

A good horror/mystery film plays fair with its audience, introduces some logic to the plot and has characters behave as real people would in the situation set up here. Even the standard bubbleheaded heroines of early slasher flicks display more common sense than the equally dim hero of Winter Lily. (I could have accepted Clive's actions if he had been given some reason for doing them--but his behavior is flat out revolting and makes no sense at all.)

The worst written characters of Friday the 13th evidence more motivation for their behavior than the characters here. Too many lapses in logic, dreary dialogue, unfair digressions and a rather nasty view of country folk left a bad taste.

I'm glad I purchased from Marketplace and only lost a few bucks...but I will never get back the 90 minutes I wasted on this tripe. May 8, 2006

More reviews at Amazon.com ...