Daniel Humphrey (saltsan) This is one of those films that has you wanting to yell at the characters on screen starting about 20 minutes in: "Go to the police! Why don't you go to the police?" They wade into some deep crap and have no reason NOT to go to the police, but hey! Why don't they just try to solve the big mystery of the snuff film and the missing girls by themselves (even though the have enough evidence to give to the police to have the thing wrapped up in probably a day)? Only ninety minutes in, after another death and more threats on their lives, do they even mention the possibility of maybe, you know, going to the police. Of course they never do, and seem completely idiotic for that. The actors are very good, especially Ana Torrent, Fele Martinez, Xabier Elorriaga, and Miguel Picazo, maybe too good for such a lame script. Ana Torrent especially seems far too intelligent to be acting as stupid as she (or her character) does for 121 minutes. I mean I get that horror films have characters doing stupid things, like NOT GOING TO THE POLICE when they should, but this one seems especially bad in that regard. It's not even particularly stylish which sometimes covers for bad script problems. The director would do far better in his later films.

Red_Identity So I watched this for my Spanish Cinema class, and I thought it was decent enough. Nothing too original, but it's interesting and intriguing throughout. I kept thinking I knew who would be the actual antagonist but I kept being wrong, and in that respect it works. The actor who plays Chema is the stand-out character here, you just care so much for him. Maybe it's because he's so unbelievably cute and because he looks like a young Gary Oldman. Regardless, the whole cast does some decent work and it has some nice atmosphere. Nothing too fantastic but it gets the job done right, and sometimes that's all that is needed (especially for an actual film class)

ma-cortes This suspenseful movie concerns about Angela(Ana Torrent), she's an university student at a journalism university in Madrid. She comes across a snuff movie that shows a girl being tortured and killed. She befriends Chema(Fele Martinez), a young completely obsessed with violent films. They find out that the girl was an university at their school and her former fiancé named Bosco(Eduardo Noriega) holds a camera similar to the snuff's shooting. They early discover the killing was actually filmed on campus.The motion picture displays genuine chills, suspense, mystery and dark atmosphere with a shocker finale . Packs excellent creation of tension, thriller, terror , emotions and brief gore. It's an exciting, bizarre film; skillfully proceeded by Alejandro Amenabar and turns out to one of the most unusual Spaniard horror movie ever made and certainly one of the most unsettling. Plenty of shocks, the eerie images deliver the exciting united a creepy score by Amenabar, also screenwriter, along with Mateo Gil, of the thrilling plot. Intelligent edition, special use of murky sets and slick utilization of shock images make this one, a magnificent terror film. Gloomy and sombre cinematography by Hans Burman which heightens the suspense. The picture is well directed by Amenabar in his first movie. After he achieved various hits, such as : 'Open your ears, The others and Mar adentro' . Rating : Better than average.

Robert J. Maxwell "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast," wrote John Donne. In this case -- the deaths are designed to be one step removed from reality, recorded on videotapes and shown as "snuff" films. Everybody seems to runne even faster to somebody else's death, or so the movie keeps telling us. We gawk at automobile wrecks along the road, hoping for a glimpse of a mangled body or two. On television news programs, "if it bleeds, it leads." Anyone can go to a P2P site and download video clips with such ennobling titles as, "Marine blows off Iraqi's arm." Who needs "snuff films" anymore? But, actually, that's not the subject of this film anyway. It's really a Brian DePalma ripoff, with every cliché in the book. Ana Torrent is the student-in-jeopardy. When she's investigating a kind of dungeon with a young man she believes is a friend, the door slams shut, locked, behind them and, pop, the lights go out and they only have half a box of matches to find their way through the cobwebs. If that's not enough, at the climax she's in a deserted house with a sadistic murderer and, pow, a fuse blows and the lights go out yet again.As a sinister professor of cinema argues, the American film industry is flooding the market with junk. In defense of our national pride we should give the public exactly what they want right here in Spain -- more junk, better junk, bigger junk. I think the director of this film really believes it because he's done a superlative job of following the formula. For instance, in a DePalma film, there may be a guy that the woman-in-jeopardy might think of as a friend, perhaps a non-conditional love psychiatrist, but she may find some bit of evidence, some small thing, that throws suspicion upon him. I can't count the number of times some artifact or some factoid throws Ana's suspicions on a friend here. I mean it. I really couldn't count them. The switcheroos come so thick and fast they become glutinous and indistinguishable from one another. One's flicker fusion threshold is exceeded.Is Ana Torrent really the little dark-haired girl who whispered her way through "The Spirit of the Beehive"? Well, as Marlon Brando tells Eva Marie Saint in "On The Waterfront," "You grew up nice." She has no chin to speak of, great big dark wet orbs, clean features, and looks vulnerable and smart, not unlike Thalia Balsam but less loose-lipped and more remote. Chema, who may or may not be her weird friend, looks like Johnny Depp with stringy hair and a beard. The murderer looks like some heart throb exhumed from a movie of the 1950s, maybe Frankie Avalon or Fabian. The professor, although a pervert and a murderer, looks handsome and distinguished. All professors look that way. I looked that way when I was a professor. I still look that way, despite what you may have heard from my psychotherapist or my so-called friends.The director might think he's preaching to us about our taste for violent imagery. (If he's saying that we have one, he's certainly right about that.) But he's pandering too. He's showing us the very thing he's condemning us for wanting to see, and he's guiltless but hardly guileless. It doesn't help to know that we're watching fake sadism exercised by actors in a fictional movie, that it's like watching Daffy Duck looking at himself in a mirror, with neither image real. That's a joke between the cartoon and the audience. Here, the joke is entirely on the audience. The more apt comparison is to one of those war movies in which we witness suffering and see blood all over and the movie is called an "anti-war movie", but our side always seems to win.I thought "Thesis" was captivating because it was so well executed, but considered it insulting as well.