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Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The Moth Diaries had a great storyline, I really likes the idea. However a few scenes in the movie would be very triggering for someone struggling with suicide and self harm. There is no prewarning about this, as some movies have, and personally a prewarning would have prevented me from watching it. I am however acknowledging that The Moth Diaries is the genre horror, and there are many gory scenes in many horror movies which may become triggering, but The Moth Diaries is specifically graphic and unsettling. In other aspects of the movie I found there to be no real building of the tension. Things would happen and new information would be revealed but as a viewer there was no real anticipation or suspense. The acting seemed fake and unrealistic.

Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) is 16 year old and still haunted by her father's suicide. Her best friend is her roommate Lucy (Sarah Gadon) at her boarding school. Ernessa Block (Lily Cole) is the new girl and she befriends Lucy to the dismay of Rebecca. The mysterious new girl somehow got friend Charley (Valerie Tian) expelled. After Rebecca and Dora (Melissa Farman) witness Ernessa do something supernatural, Dora is later found dead falling off a ledge. There is also a new teacher Mr. Davies (Scott Speedman) at the school.This could have been a creepy Gothic horror movie. Mary Harron who made 'American Psycho' still pose the same problem to me as before. Her sparse style really stripes away the tension. She doesn't elevate the material and there is some good material here. More importantly, there are some great actors here trying their best. However, the movie never takes off. There is just a lack of tension. There is a lack of visual style. This is a bland execution. The female melodrama promises something that is never emotionally delivered. It's potentially an interesting horror but Harron doesn't know how to make one. Of course, this one doesn't have Christian Bale.

Actually not a bad movie. Lily Cole and the actress who played the main character are pretty good. There are some plot holes: The teacher who kisses the girl, nothing happens to him, and one wonders why he is even present in the movie. It is fairly clear from the beginning of the movie what is happening, and what will likely happen. We're told that Ernessa has to do laps in the pool as a punishment for not showing up at gym classes, but we're not told why, and we discover she can't swim. This tidbit goes nowhere, except to provide justification for a later murder. The movie has Ernessa changing into moths, but again, we're not told why. Ernessa wants the female led to kill herself but we're not told why a suicide will somehow guarantee vampire immortality. One of the girls, a Japanese student, is somehow induced to throw a chair out of the window, ostensibly to get her kicked out, and therefore out of the circle of friends so Ernessa can continue her work... but we're not told really why. One of the other characters goes off to the woods to lose her virginity but this is apparently only a vehicle for a dream sequence where the studly English teacher is seducing the student. But since the English teacher sub-plot really doesn't go anywhere, one wonders why this was included. But if you're doing something else, and have the movie on, it's not a bad flick. The set is visually rich, and the characters are present enough to make it entertaining. To summarize there is a tension throughout the movie that was pretty good though one wonders whether or not the director/screenwriter had some difficulty in finding her ending.

What is beyond bad? Annoying...yes, that's it. No scene lasted more than 20 seconds, emotions flashed by like humming birds, people came and went, slept woke and slept again within seconds, got sick better and died just as fast. No time to care about any character, and certainly no reason to care about this movie, with it's bad acting, inexplicably bad direction, and pointless plot. Ick-too-ee...bad taste in mouth movie...be warned.If you want to watch a scary movie with children, and vampires, see "Let the Right One In" in English, or it's foreign original. Heck, any one of the Twilight movies would be infinitely better.