(This review contains spoilers.)
What Lies Beneath (2000) isn’t a great film. Heck, it isn’t even a particularly good film by most people’s standards, given the 47% Rotten Tomatoes score.
It is however one of my favorite films, and it’s not a guilty-pleasure thing or a so-bad-it’s-good thing; I love this film for what it could have been: a masterpiece.
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[Update: I re-watched Willy Wonka three years after writing this post and have a few more thoughts. I don’t know why I assumed it took place in England; it must have been the Dickensian last names that threw me, along with the quintessentially English schoolteacher. But none of the other kids (or Charlie’s family members for that matter) have English accents. I can’t pin down exactly where the story is supposed to take place, but I guess it must be somewhere in America, which makes Wonka’s nationality less intrusive. (I understand it was filmed in Germany, but that doesn’t help explain the plethora of American accents.)
I fell in love with movies like Session 9 and the 1999 remake of House On Haunted Hill quite accidentally. I didn’t realize that my love of this horror sub-genre was even alive in me. I think up until the point when I saw Session 9 in 2007, had I been pressed, I would have said that my favorite flavor of horror movies was really anything with a priest.
Jason Herrboldt 