Review by Sue Finn
Directed by: Billy Lewis
Starring: Donny Boaz, Cari Moskow, Reid Doyle
Opening with a hard voiced narration reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Terrible Two lies when it tells us that the following is all true.
Pregnant Rose (Cari Moskow - bad) and husband Albert (Reid Doyle - worse) are shown around a new house in Greenfeld (a ‘nice’ neighbourhood) and much is made by Real Estate agent Fred P (Donny Boaz) about how pregnant Rose is and how perfect the home is for children.
Rose gets emotional over an empty room with a toy shopping cart in it - I know about pregnancy hormones, but come on! And they take it.
“It’s gunna make me cry,” she exclaims.
“One day it will,” Fred says in a stage whisper.
Flash forward seven years to Rose walking around in black crying and it’s clear that their children (two girls as noted by all the portraits around their home) were born and are now gone. She cradles creepy dolls and says she misses them into the thin air.
Oddly, it seems the girls only ever played with that abandoned shopping trolley and the old creepy dolls, as no other toys or interests ever make an appearance.
Rose's Mum comes to visit and offers to take the mournful couple out to dinner to help them ‘get over it,’ as Albert says, but Rose is reluctant to leave the house... ever!
'Something’s missing,' she tells Albert - her relationship with God... I gag on my popcorn.
She gets up that night to bake the girls a cake and somehow this involves liberally dusting her face with flour at some stage, as she looks as if she has a facemask on.
Asleep at the table, Albert wakes her and a jump scare occurs, but Albert’s reaction is so flat and wooden it sucks any possible scare from the scene. He follows seeing his wife as a ghoul by asking her if she’d like a coffee.
When he suggests she call on Doctor Connor to see what he says, she actually replies “I don’t care what he says, has he ever had two girls die at the same time on their birthday?”
Rose finds a manuscript up in the attic that tells all about a man called Jack who battled with demons called Legion. He then helpfully explains that if you want to know how to battle Legion yourself you should just read to the end - thanks Jack!
The good Doctor Connor visits and complains of the cold while Rose says she wishes other kids were dead instead of hers. She tells him about Legion and he jumps up to leave in a panic.
It seems the cameraman was lost in the hallway during this scene as we have an inexplicable steady cam up the corridor shot while the players are talking in another room and aren’t even on camera - bizarre.
We are treated to Albert's goggle-eyed reaction to hearing his dead daughters' voices on a secret tape recorder he’d inexplicably left in their room, followed by a flashback to him finding them dead after they fell off the roof on their birthday - a cheap, emotionally anaemic scene.
A knife wielding upper class lady (the hilariously monikered ‘Nebula’) breaks into their apartment while they are praying, licks Albert's blood from the knife and says they’re gunna need help before leaving. Of course they don’t call the police, but rather the real estate agent Fred, who says being attacked by a home intruder “sucks”.
They tell him they want to sell the house now!
The shit majorly hits the fan when Doctor Conner pops by to explain that the manuscript was all true and their daughters were likely a sacrifice or some gumpf like that. Albert has a nonsensical flashback and Rose yells at them both to “shut up” in a demon voice while playing with a knife.
That night when they are alone, the girls come to play.
There are many, many things wrong with this film.
The acting is just lacklustre and emotionless. Moscow acts more like a surly teenager than a grieving mother. Doyle acts like a robot.
They never behave like people who like each other, let alone love each other; they never convey connection or shared grief.
The screenplay by Billy Lewis is heavy on melodrama and petty squabbles, and the storyline is an incoherent mess that also manages to be tedious and almost offensively insensitive.
The choices Lewis makes as a director are also lacking. Scenes play like a daytime soap, with characters walking two steps away and staring into the middle distance after making grand statements like “I’m only human!”
The absence of suspense and failure to build any sort of tension or dread undermines all attempts at scares such as the ‘ghoul face’ scene or when that old pink shopping cart drifts towards Rose in the dark and the scene is so stilted it barely raises a reaction from her.
It also borrows heavily from too many horrors to name, but The Strangers immediately springs to mind.
Unfortunately, The Terrible Two is just too terrible.
The Terrible Two is on VOD now.
