The Bride – review

The Bride is a 2016, low-budget, horror movie. While I’m sure it was made with love, it adds nothing new to the genre. The production and acting could use some fine-tuning, but with a bigger budget this movie could’ve have worked. If this movie were a comedy, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. The underlying idea of the plot is entertaining, but the execution comes off as confusing attempt to make a story that has already been told. The most memorable performance is hidden and is not utilized to its full entertaining potential.

The Bride begins with a scrolling text crawl about a legend of an Apache woman that was raped and killed on her wedding day and rose from the grave to get bloody vengeance. Flash-forward several decades and we meet Kira and Marco, a couple about to get married. In a bungled kidnapping plot Marco is killed and Kira is raped and murdered. The spirit of the Apache woman that got her revenge allows Kira to rise from her grave to exact revenge on her killers.

The story is very clichéd borrowing heavily from elements of The Crow and I Spit on Your Grave. The text crawl at the beginning seemed like it would have been a much more entertaining movie by itself. The characters of Kira and Marco have no chemistry and between them arguing over which one of them is “cray-cray” and trying to decipher their accents, it becomes arduous to figure out if they are worth investing in emotionally. As soon as Kira witnesses the death of Marco she shows no emotion to the loss until she rises up from the grave.

At one point Marco gives Kira a set of dog tags in an attempt to be romantic. One of them says, “Fuck it on a bucket” the other says, “you are the air that I want to breathe for the rest of my life.” The exposition dump is painfully awkward and the overall plan of the kidnappers is ludicrous.  Even the kidnappers themselves are just stereotypes played to a wildly exaggerated way. The ending is baffling making it a very frustrating film.

The effects and the production quality are worse than local commercials. The sound is generally muffled and there is obvious dubbing of the dialogue. The guns don’t sound like guns and fire off cartoonish bullets and release painfully fake muzzle flashes that make this production rank right up with amateur high school student movies. There is even a moment when they attempt to show a guy on FaceTime but it is clearly a superimposed video in a static image of a hand holding a smart phone. The ghost of the Apache girl is less realistic than Obi Wan Kenobi’s ghost in The Empire Strikes Back.

The costumes look like the cast raided a Halloween outlet store. The kills are pretty lackluster despite the gore and some of the scenes seem like they might be tongue in cheek but the tone does not indicate humor.  For example when ghoulish avenger Kira gets stabbed by a machete she just takes a tampon, crams it in the wound, then seals the wound in duct tape.

The characters often stumble their lines as if they are just barely off-book, this matches the awkwardness of the unnatural dialogue. Despite the many flaws to this movie, the character playing Harrison is at least entertaining. Lane Townsend chews the scenery like a champ and really falls into the role of a comic book style villain.  It is not particularly thrilling as a horror movie but the action can be pretty amusing.

I cannot recommend this movie since it was not my taste. The story is nothing new but there can easily be an audience for this as a possible cult film. There are a lot of elements of The Crow and I Spit on Your Grave, so if you are interested in the rape-revenge genre I suggest you watch those films first. It is not a particularly well-made movie but it does have the potential to entertain. Give it a try at your peril.