We waited a long time for the Polaroid movie. It had a limited release in Germany in January 2019. The film was completed and ready to go back in November 2017. When it was finally released on Netflix and online on February 9th, 2020, was it worth it? So what do you do when you’ve finished making a movie and something associated with your film turns into a scandal? Two years is an appropriate timeframe to distance your movie from a Weinstein scandal.
The Polaroid Movie Has Too Many Horror Tropes
Whether or not generic ideas make you want to watch this more or less is entirely up to you. Maybe you scoff at unoriginal ideas and hate repetition. You might in fact, just love an easy movie to watch at night, and this will be perfect for you. If you’ve never seen Final Destination, Selfie From Hell, or The Tale of the Curious Camera, chances are this will be quite the cool first-time watch. Whatever the case, this will not show you anything new or novel in its approach.
- The girl finds an antique camera and she and her friend take a photo with it. She lives in a very old, massive house… alone.
- She looks at the photo sees a silhouette in the background and freaks herself out a little.
- Later, she hears a noise and calls out “Who’s there?” several times, thinking perhaps it’s her friend who’s come back for no reason to roll marbles from her attic.
- After her off-screen demise, we cut to a new bunch of people where the camera is picked up by the friend of a budding photographer and passed on as a gift. Immediately she takes a photo and we notice the same silhouette in the background. Uh-oh.
How Long is the Polaroid Movie?
This film from director Lars Klevberg and Blair Butler runs for 1 hour and 28 minutes. It has a PG-13 rating so there is nothing too extreme included.
Final Polardestination Ringu
This re-created Final Destination Ringu story has several things going for it. For one, the cast is great. It doesn’t matter if they all happen to be models in waiting. They deliver their lines nicely and hardly anything they do is annoying. Kathryn Prescott as Bird even fulfills her position as not being a total twat bringing a fresh novel approach for horror characters. She is mostly smart and seems to be a bit of a nerd fixing things in a little antique shop where nobody buys anything. However, one scene where she nearly choked herself with her own scarf was quite the foot in her mouth.
The writers tried to create a little bit of depth for the main cast by adding a bit of backstory to some essential characters and I appreciate that. They also managed to create some twist-like elements and those that hang in there to the end of this movie will like the final scenes the most.
Grace Zabriskie stars as mommy Sable later in the piece and those who recognize her will get a kick out of the spanners she manages to throw into the pot. Many will know her from The Grudge, Seinfeld, and quite a few recognizable roles.
Some will be overly baffled when one of the Polaroid man’s victims knocks herself out on a light in her own house. Who hung that light there anyway? Whatever the case, it seems to have been hung dangerously low. I guess when you’re inside and running away from something, you need to get creative when there are no twigs to trip over.
Is Polaroid Movie a Good Movie?
Polaroid is a ready-made, color-by-numbers, horror film. This one is rated PG which made it less special than it could have been. It’s also in a very similar format to a few other films I’ll mention later. It’s based on a short film of the same name which you can watch at the end of the article.
The music is so familiar, I would love for someone to do a side-by-side between this and the Final Destination movies. The music is good though, it’s an appropriate fit and you always know when you’re supposed to be scared (even if you aren’t.)
Overall, I liked the Polaroid movie… I did. It’s made well, it has all the stuff I like in a movie I’ve seen before. I’d recommend it to people who don’t like horror but like a scary story. It’s a shame that filmmakers with this much talent waste it on ideas that are so saturated they need to be mashed into other successful ideas in such an obvious way. At least it was better than Selfie from Hell. It’s not better than Final Destination or Ringu, but it’s a nice time filler.
What I would have loved to have seen was for this to be tied into the Final Destination series as a prequel. Don’t judge me, but I did.
Beware of This Camera…Once You Take It, It Takes You
I give Polaroid
2.5 young people living alone in very large houses out of 5
Movies like Polaroid that have curses are Tarot, The Witch 2: The Other One, and the short film We Got A Monkey’s Paw. Watch any of these films next.
Dimension Films
First Released in Germany, in January 2019. The USA in May 2019.
Directed by Lars Klevberg and written by Blair Butler.
Watch the Polaroid movie via JustWatch.com for any region you are in.
