A review of "The Mooring"

Confessions of a Film Junkie: A review of “The Mooring”

By: Brian Cotnoir

     Wow.  This film really pissed me off.  It’s so dumb and so slow paced that I spent most of this film whining to myself over how much longer I was going to have to suffer.  This film officially gets my vote for the “Most Boring Horror/Thriller” film I have ever sat through (so far).     

It's So Freaking Boring!!!

                    The film I’m talking about is called “The Mooring” and the plot goes like this: a bunch of teenage girls who have cell phone/technology addictions are sent to an outdoor seminar by their parents where they will not be allowed to have their cell phones or any other technology.  As part of the seminar the girls must ride down a river on a house boat and camp outdoors, while participating in team building exercises and learn self-reliance.  While the girls are traveling down the river their boat’s engine craps out so their Adult supervisor leaves them unattended in the middle of the wilderness so she can go and get help.  The group unfortunately comes across a redneck couple who decided to hunt the girls for no reason, and now it’s a story of how are they going to survive.                                   

I hate them all so much!!!

    Dear Odin in Asgard, this movie is slow!  The first half of the movie drags on forever.  Molasses in subzero temperatures moves at a faster pace than this film, and it is so boring.  Want to know why it’s so boring; the films cast is a concentrated version of the most boring human demographic ever: teenage girls.  Seriously, have you ever been around a group of teenage girls for 15 minutes and listened in on one of their conversations?  It’s enough to want to drive you to a slow and painful suicide, but that’s just one of the many faults with the film.                                                              
    Another problem with the film is the villain.  I don’t even remember what this guy’s name is so I’m just going to call him “Evil Redneck”, because that’s all he’s really shown as in the film.  So, Evil Redneck decides that he’s going to hunt these girls, but he’s not all bad.  Like the one scene where one girl has an asthma attack and he decides to give her, her inhaler so she can run away from him.  I mean he kills her, like, two scenes later, which in retrospect made that scene where he showed her compassion totally pointless because he should have just killed her then.  So what is the evil redneck’s motivation for hunting these girls?  Why because he’s an evil redneck of course.  

Character Development??? Aint Nobody got time for that!

Yet, another cliché in horror films that annoys me to know end.  Why are people from rural country areas always portrayed as being psychotic, incestuous, homicidal lunatics that want to kill all outsiders who wander on their land?  With the entire wide spread of technology we have today, I think it would be very rare to find a person that fits the description of a horror movie evil redneck.  And you know what; I’m just tired of seeing country folk get a negative wrap in horror films.  Why doesn’t some studio make a film about people from a rural area who travel into the big city, where every there tries to murder them?  It probably wouldn’t be that good, but you know what I’d still want to see it.                                               

Useless!  You are completely useless!!!

    The evil redneck also has a girlfriend who helps him commit his crimes.  We first see her in the opening scene of the film on a camping trip with her family ten years ago.  She wanders away from the camp and is kidnapped by the evil redneck, where she is ultimately doomed to remain.  Her character is really annoying and completely uninteresting, and then in the last 10 minutes of the film she decides to have a change of heart and murders her evil redneck boyfriend to save the girls, so yeah she was a pretty useless character to the film.                     

     Bottom line: do not see this film.  It’s slow paced, it’s incredibly boring, the characters aren’t the least bit interesting or likeable, and most of the dialogue is comprised of high-pitched screaming and girls crying.  The best thing to do is put this shop on the boat and let it sink to the bottom, where it can never bother anyone ever again.