Streaming Service: Hulu
Date Watched: 10/15/2020
Uncanny Annie is another Into the Dark Hulu original film (like Pure, which I already reviewed) and feels like an expanded Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt episode. Since I loved watching those shows back in the day, this film was right in my wheelhouse.
The premise is nothing new. It’s a bit of Jumanji mixed with Hellraiser mixed with a bit of urban myth. A group of friends gather on Halloween night and decide to play a game in tribute to a friend who died earlier in the year. The characters are surprisingly well-established very quickly and have distinctive personalities and behaviors. The scriptwriter obviously took the time to establish the cast of characters, which pays off when things start to go horribly wrong. You actually care what happens to these friends. They all played their roles really well and it felt like they had been friends for quite some time. I particularly liked the young women in the cast.
The friends decide to play a game none of them has seen before and they assume was left by the previous inhabitant of the house. This is the Uncanny Annie game. Though these films are really low-budget, the detail in the game cards, tokens, and board were really well done. It actually looked like something that might be fun to play if there was in a demon trying to kill you. Of course, when the game starts the participants don’t realize Uncanny Annie is a real entity they’re playing against. This becomes apparent when supernatural forces start to claim the lives of the players when they fail at their turn in the game.
There is a really good back story to the underlying tensions among the friends that starts to play out the longer they play the game. Again, the scriptwriter did a really good job on setting up all the characters on their particular arcs.
Some people will really like the end of this movie and other people won’t like it as much, but it worked in my honest opinion. Again, if you like the Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt and that sort of storytelling, you’ll enjoy Uncanny Annie.
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Though the film takes care to show what happens if you cheat in the game right at the very beginning, the friends belief that if they win the game they might be able to reclaim their dead was convincing enough that I wasn’t too sure how the film would end. The friends were assuming that if they won the dead would return to life, but this didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea considering that the entire house had been transported into the box. The circumstances they found themselves trapped in were all associated with the game, so the assumption that winning would have a great reward made sense.
I like the characters enough to hope that they would succeed.
Of course, they didn’t. One more thing, Uncanny Annie looks like Grandmama from The Addam's Family Values as a young girl. Just sayin'....
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