Watch The Curse of Downers Grove For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Sorry, this movie sucks

Excellent but underrated film

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I don't exactly know what I was expecting from a horror film written by Bret Easton Ellis, but it wasn't this. To start with, The Curse of Downers Grove isn't even a horror film... or at least, not the kind of horror suggested by the publicity. Besides, The Curse of Downers Grove is based on a novel written by Michael Hornburg, so Ellis was only in charge of the adaptation to cinema; it's possible that the problems came from the original material. But it's still difficult for me to understand how the movie ended up being such an incongruous hodgepodge of shapes and styles. And the worst thing of all is that The Curse of Downers Grove had the potential of being an interesting film. The shortage of supernatural elements (depending on the criterion from every spectator) doesn't avoid it from portraying horrors of a more daily and realistic nature, such as bullying, sexual assault, police corruption... well; I won't reveal more than that. The point is that The Curse of Downers Grove deals with themes which are much more disturbing than any vindictive ghost or generic tribal curse. That's why I think this film would have worked better as a drama, in which said themes could have been dealt with the necessary maturity not to decrease their impact and social relevance; or maybe, it should have completely plunged into the mystic of the provincial superstition in order to create a darker and more psychological tale. I don't know; I appreciate the intention to deal with so many themes, but I feel that, when bullying and sexual assault are set in the same context as curses and spirits... nobody wins and everybody loses. The raw reality darkens the fantasy, and the fantasy is tarnished with cruel situations which can't be solved with an exorcism, or a sacrifice to some local deity. Sure, there have been films which perfectly mixed horror and social commentary (They Live, Videodrome); but The Curse of Downers Grove is very, very far from that level. On the positive side, the actors make a good work in their roles, highlighting Bella Heathcote, who faces the aggression from her partners and the hypothetical supernatural influence on the events torturing her with equal credibility. Pity that the screenplay constantly destroys her character's consistency; in one scene, she's criticizing the youngsters who make bad decisions, and in the following one, she accepts to attend a party with strangers of very doubtful intentions. That's the narrative laziness I didn't expect to see associated with Ellis' name. In conclusion, despite having some interesting ideas, The Curse of Downers Grove is a tedious and unsatisfactory film whose main problem is not having decided its intention from the beginning.

In many ways, this is the kind of horror movie that Wes Craven's "Scream" was supposed to put on notice, making the case that you can't get away with stupid, thinly drawn, overly sexualized adolescent characters who seem not to have a clue about anything around them. I guess no one told director/co-writer Derick Martini or co-writer Bret Easton Ellis how ridiculous making such a clueless film would be in 2015. Not that the film itself would have been any better in 1989, but the act of creating it wouldn't have seemed so inane.There is, at least, an intriguing premise -- that the curse of Downer's Grove is the death of one graduating high school senior each year. Exploring whether the curse is real, in horror movie terms, might have been interesting, or whether it is connected to some kind of revenge of the natives who once occupied the land. This is hinted at but never explored. But this film is too scattered to do that, instead dropping vague references to drug problems (never really explored or taken seriously) and thwarted ambitions of abusive fathers (never really explored or taken seriously). Everything and every character here is a cliché. It would be one thing if they started out as clichés and developed into characters we might care about, but they don't develop at all. It is perhaps unfair to criticize the performers because, really, what could they do with this junk?, but they are mostly pretty bad. Some of those whose work I'm a little familiar with, like Kevin Zegers, Lucas Till and Tom Arnold, have been much better elsewhere, so I'm prepared to believe that most of the rest can be better than their work here would indicate. Hopefully, this will be a resume low-light for them, rather than a career suicide. But if the pedestrian direction in any indication, Martini himself shouldn't get many more chances to badly mishandle any material at all.

When i first read the plot i thought it would be a mystery movie about a grudge and a big secret about it, that's why i decided to watch it. Spoiler: What u get is a movie about some Teens having stress with each other. A very pointless plot with some bad acting. After 30 minutes of Film I already knew that her childhood friend was a psycho. I think this was meant to a big surprise at the end of the movie, well it was not.The movie is about a stalker who stalks a girl but his father was a former policeman, so the Police can't help (bullshit). Although he breaks the arm of her brother they don't even Arrest him cause they haven't enough evidences. You get angry how stupid the plot is.The idiotic ending is the only "connection" to a so called grudge, when they talk about it. The movie is terrible, disappointing, idiotic, pointless. Don't waste your time like i did.

Let's get the premise clear, there is barely any curse in this movie. It only used as a pretext to shoehorn script made of Facebook cheesy one-liners from a typical teenager's page. The movie is shallow and barely presents any thrill at all, it merely produces predictable story with abundance of flamboyant dialogues that only serve as lackluster musing.Chrissie is a senior high school student at Downers Grove. There's a strange curse that a senior will die before graduation. It creates a sort of Final Destination foreshadowing at start, but this curse is far-fetched to say the least. The story is a straight forward, slow-moving stalker cliché and despite its relatively short runtime, the movie feels highly tedious.Chrissie uses monologues a lot, as in almost every five minutes. When she's not doing that, she's spewing commentary about life or religion. It's an effort to give this average brunette female lead some depth to her character so audience would invest on her. Unfortunately, her bantering sounds authentic, almost to the point of reading from cat poster.She even delivers monologue on the scenes where she has no business in. This gets old fast since it sounds preachy and self-righteous. It doesn't help when the other characters are too one-dimensional, probably in the exception of her younger brother who reminds me of young John Connor. The actors perform their characters rigidly and even though the movie tries to give mystery about them or the near irrelevant curse, you'll see the twist from miles away.For a movie with grim title of The Curse of Downers Grave, it is incredibly feeble and timid. I guess Cheap Scream Knock-off wouldn't generate any interest, but unfortunately that's what this movie is.