Movie Review: Kristy (2014)

The movie stars Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene, Lucas Till, Mathew St. Patrick and Erica Ash.

Even though it was starting to get a little bit late and my wife and I had to be up in the morning, I was in the mood to watch a movie. So, after scrolling through Netflix for a short while, I wound up picking out this film primarily because of the manageable 90-minute runtime. As it turns out, it was a better movie than I was expecting it to be.

The movie was far from perfect. For one, I'm still not 100 percent sure how you have a college, exclusive or not, that is in the middle of nowhere, miles from any form of other civilization. Plus, when I saw the various scenes early in the film, ranging from a class science experiment to her running and swimming, I knew the movie would predictably find a way to have all of those factor in later. Despite that, this movie did wind up being entertaining.

There are a couple things I found I really liked about this film. One of the big ones was the mystery about why they kept referring to Justine (Bennett) as Kristy. Since it was a cult that was determined to kill all women with that name and stalked its victims first, it seemed odd it would be a case of mistaken identity and even more odd that the cult could kill anyone just by giving them that name. It was a small mystery the movie did a good job explaining later.

I also liked how there was at least some effort to stand up to the cult, both from the security guards and the groundskeeper (James Ransone). That made her situation (especially since the police were apparently very far away) much more desperate when they failed and she ultimately wound up being all by herself against a gang of four people.

Plus, while some parts of their hunt, for the reasons I mentioned before, were kind of predictable, I did like how the movie managed to throw in some twists that kept her from gaining the upper hand completely, at least until toward the end. This did, at least for a while, make me wonder if it was a movie that would see her escaping or if she would wind up killed.

My only real complaint about this film is I wish there was some sort of surprise twist regarding the mask-wearing cult members. Since the movie went out of its way to avoid showing three out of the four, I was fully expecting her boyfriend (Till) and/or her roommate (Ash) to be behind those masks and was a little surprised when that wasn't the case. The movie still wound up being decent. But, I just think it would have been a little better with a betrayal like that. Not to mention, the masks really don't have much of an impact overall if the people behind them are strangers.

I wasn't really sure what to expect when we started watching this film. But, while there were some flaws, I thought it was an entertaining movie and would recommend it.

My Grade: B