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Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. So, since 2011, I have spent the entire month of October every year reviewing a horror movie each day. I've changed formats many times over the years, and in the past few years, I've even been joined by my wife Solee, as well as the occasional guest. We've got text, drawings, video reviews, audio reviews... we got it all! Wanna check out our reviews? Look below, or use the menu to the left to dig deeper!
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  Belittling Horror Excessively: The Broken 01:40 PM -- Tue October 8, 2013  

SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Synopsis: This whole review is mega-spoilers, beware. While a family is having a lovely meal together, a big mirror suddenly breaks for no reason. This is bad luck. Gradually each of them is murdered and replaced by a mirror-duplicate who comes out of a mirror that breaks. Something like that ensues.

Scariness Type: This is a weird movie. It's very slow and quiet. It's got this long spiral of dread for the entire movie.

Rating: 3/5 Jeeps.

Body Count: Four or so? Something like that. But maybe 0 in a way, they all get immediately replaced by exact duplicates. Evil exact duplicates.

Fun Fact: Dextrocardia is a condition wherein your heart is on the right side of your chest instead of the left. It also means you are an evil mirror-person.

Best Moment: There are some shots in the movie that are done from 'behind' a mirror. You see this black, empty world on the mirror side, and then the real world on the other side, like you're looking through a window. Those shots are really cool, and they sort of speak to me, relating to a story idea I've worked on off-and-on for years about a kid who can travel into mirrors and exit from any other mirror in the world. I guess it's a thing we think about - mirrors are weird, so we perceive some sort of magic there.

Worst Moment: I don't know if it's the worst really, but there's this moment when I almost giggled. The main character is investigating a drip in the attic of her boyfriend's house, when suddenly he pops up through the attic entrance, lit from underneath, looking so ridiculously evil it's just hilarious, questioning why she should be up there. He looks like an evil puppet.

A Suspension Bridge Too Far: Everything the evil mirror-people does seems to suggest they are literally just regular people, who happen to have very bad intentions, and seek to replace the normal people. Everything that is, except when one shows up and pops her fist straight into her duplicate's mouth, right up to the wrist. Just BOOP straight in there, and she wiggles it around or does something inside because it kills the poor girl in a bloody fashion. I have no idea what that was. It was definitely supernatural because you can't just do that to somebody (plus you'd get bit really badly), but it's the only supernatural thing the mirror-people ever do aside from coming out of mirrors.

Horror Tropes: I don't quite remember, but I think we got the blood-drip-from-above in this one! If not, there was still a water drip that she dreamed was blood.

My Take: There was stuff I really enjoyed about this movie, and I have no problem with slow, moody movies in general. At times this one really dragged it out a bit much though, with dozens of replays of a car crash the main character was in, over and over, every time she sat around thinking about it. There is a twist in this movie, and it may not even be entirely obvious what it is, because there's not much dialogue here, you kind of piece things together for yourself. I'll tell you what my theory is, and of course, like the rest of this review, it's a total spoiler: The main character got mirror-murdered very early in the movie, and the person who got in the car crash was actually her evil twin. The twist is that the car crash gave her amnesia, so she forgot to be evil. It was only at the end when she found her good twin's dead body that she remembered she was supposed to be evil and the ridiculously long and boring shot of her driving at the very end was her getting ready to... do whatever it is evil mirror-people do. Go cause more mayhem. Not a happy ending, I guess. But good for her that she got her life figured out.

Missed Opportunity: I think they missed out on making this faster-paced and more involving. Also more clear what is going on.

The Lesson: Don't break mirrors, it's bad luck. Haven't you already heard this? Plus you have to clean them up.

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