Lace Crater

So a woman sleeps with a ghost. Then she becomes ill. And that's it. Slow paced with moments of what could be spooky or creepy, but the film doesn't put much effort into take it in that direction. So, just a weird indie film of a woman with a ghostly disease. Huh.

I bought this movie for two reasons: (1) It has the stupendous Betsey Brown in it, and (2) It's supposed to be a unique kind of ghost story. During the opening credits, I did not see Brown's name. I'm thinking, Maybe this was a blunder on my part. Then, literally four minutes in, I officially hate all the characters. Two girls are drooling over a guy with a man-bun, who hardly has enough hair for one (which is beside the point, dude has a man-bun). It soon becomes crystal clear that this is easily one of the most superficial group of friends ever put in a horror movie (I had to laugh at the overabundance of genres imdb has picked out to describe this snoozer, giving it far, FAR too much credit), and Lace Crater is 81 solid minutes of the most inane conversations you will ever hear (that is, of the ones you CAN hear). I would not be in the least bit surprised if this movie turned out to be 100% improvised by inexperienced student actors (though Peter Vack appears as Michael, the "ghost," wrapped in burlap who can do normal physical things, and looks and talks like a regular guy). So this group of friends stay at a house in the Hamptons. And Ruth (Lindsay Burdge, who is saddled with the task of carrying this abortion) is fresh off a breakup, and could use the time away... though I was under the impression her ex was on the trip. Go figure. So she claims the "haunted" room, and shacks up with Michael the ghost. The rest of the movie is her getting sick with side-effects, and her so-called friends turn on her! Honestly, I don't know if I've ever groaned and rolled my eyes more times than during this movie. These are insanely shallow people to follow, though Burdge does her best with the extremely limited material. Oh, everyone's into drugs, so there are endless opportunities to go trippy and/or artsy. One has to assume the filmmakers are on board here. There is one adult in the entire movie, Ruth's doctor, and he is a Grade-A moron. The director is credited for writing, too, so if I were to believe actual dialogue was written for this movie, I would have to assume the director just graduated elementary school. All the kids speak in the same manner. That is, the dialogue is positively peppered with "or whatevers," "you knows," and "likes." So if, like, you're into that king of thing or whatever, you know, you might like it. Even the ghost spoke like the living! It's "like," enough already. In one scene that goes on for several minutes, there are a good 4 conversations going on at once, and you can't understand or follow ANY of them. Why was I subjected to this? As for the reasons I bought Lace Crater, this hardly qualifies as a horror film (aside from the genuinely horrific dialogue). Young woman gets sick, is that it? And I blinked and missed Betsey Brown. I'm guessing she was at Ruth's disloyal friend's party. Maybe she was the one who had to pick out the "hottest" guy? I'm not sure, but one thing is blatantly clear: They gave her nothing to do in this movie. Finally, the insulting ending. What else is going to happen to her? You follow her get sick, and ostracized by all her friends. There is nothing clever in the movie, so it's going to end in an unclever way. So there's a little more story after the end, where... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happens. Then they bait you through the credits, where the camera turns, and... Nothing to see here folks! Dismal. And there are critics on board, because, I don't know, it gets artsy? So it must be important! I've seen other movies that were labeled as "mumble core," and I don't remember them being quite so insipid. Edit: I bumped this up a star, because the lead is good, it's the material that's not.

A low budget movie that attempts to address failing relationships in a very unique way. It focuses on the attractive Ruth (Lindsay Burdge) and begins with a weekend trip with friends to the Hamptons. As one might immediately expect, she's looking to hookup after the sting of a recent breakup. Unfortunately, none of the effeminate male friends show any interest so she winds up allowing a ghost that haunts the coach house she's staying in oblige. It's all downhill from there as everything begins to spiral out of control and all of her friendships begin to fall apart as her life continues to unravel. This certainly gets an "A" for effort under the circumstances but in the end the movie just did not deliver. The undeniable strength is Burdge who kept me interested throughout and made it worth watching regardless of its overall shortcomings.

The movie starts out somewhat slow. The concept behind this movie was rather interesting, but I could not get past Ruth's pompous friends. Why exactly does she associate with these people who are rotten towards her? Took away from the movie quite a bit. Most of the characters you could feel nothing for as a result.

A group of young people hang out together during a lazy, drunken weekend in the Hamptons. The house is haunted : one of the guests, called Ruth, meets an actual ghost. The couple spend the night together. Soon after Ruth begins to feel, well, weird... It is hard, here, not to think about the poem "The Sick Rose" by William Blake. But the ghost does not seem to be malignant, or all that malignant ; it is the specter of a young man who met with some cruel fate (murder ?) and has been wandering the earth ever since, dazed and confused. He does not know where he came from, how long he is going to "remain", nor where he's going to move to afterwards : he tries to console himself with a self-made theory about the perpetual cycle of life. Talk about a bleak afterlife. "Lace Crater" (don't ask me about the title, please) can be read as an allegory on a sexually transmitted disease. But there are other themes too, such as the fragility and impermanence of friendship, especially in the young. Many of us will have been part of strong friendship groups, somewhere in our late teens or early twenties. At the time, it seems as though these relationships are going to last forever, but people move, people marry, people drift apart... I rather enjoyed "Lace Crater". It provided a new spin on an old (a very old) tale and it had touches of dark wit and originality. It also had a very relatable female protagonist. If you like a good horror movie, watch this one instead of a made-by-committee blockbuster.

A bunch of bland, entitled, 30ish knobs go out to the hamptons, take some drugs, and have an impromptu ASMR hot tub party. things (almost) ramp up when the woman who is staying in the guest house bangs a strangely handsome, soft-spoken ghost. an unspecified amount of time later, she starts gooping the bed, and getting zoned out a lot. surprise! ghost std! she gets more and more hazed out, til shes basically living in the writer/directors brain, because nothing interesting happens in the last half hour of the movie. she does keep living her *life*, but its only getting... weirder. this movie did make me think my tv was broken for a minute, i guess that was the horror part? this is, overall, a darkly funny story about living in a void, and breaking through to a new, unexpectedly darker one. id love to say i liked it. its almost weird enough to be fun; the story is almost tight enough to be interesting; the cinematography is almost wonky enough to be artsy. its a solid "meh"

...when Ruth (played by Lindsay Burdge, The Midnight Swim, The Invitation), and her twenty something aged friends spend a weekend in the Hamptons. The guest house becomes more of a ghost house, when an insecure specter makes his presence known. Awkward, yet charming conversation leads to a passionate one-night stand. A suspected hangover spirals into supernatural STD body horror. Burdge's performance is enthralling from start to finish. Each scene patiently plays out, amplified by beautifully framed closeups and rolling focus. Writer/Director Harrison Atkins has given us a unique, intimate, and subtly humorous take on mumble horror.

When the overarching premise of the indie horror drama "Lace Crater" is introduced you will likely wonder if this is some kind of a goofy send up or an absurdist farce. I sure as hell did. But as events unfold it soon becomes apparent that this is far from what we gradually get in this fresh and wonderfully weird take on one of the most classic of all movie milieu's, the ghost story. Let it be said that Lindsay Burdge ("The Invitation") is outstanding as Ruth, a young woman who makes it with an apparent apparition and suffers a frightening fallout as dire consequences ensue in the wake of this supernatural and super STRANGE tryst. Burdge absolutely HAD to sell her unusually demanding role here, and she does so with fabulously flying colors, many of them through bursts of stunningly psychedelic sensationalism. Considerable kudos go to first-time feature film Director Harrison Atkins (who also wrote and edited this creepily compelling story) as well as Cinematographer Gideon de Villiers and primary Digital Visual Effects wizard Alejandro Ovalle. These three guys in particular team up to make "Lace Crater" a total trip for the senses, keeping you both entertained and consistently knocked off balance as scene after spooky scene burn themselves into your barraged brain. For the life of me I could not determine why in the hell this flick is called "Lace Crater", having heretofore, and not surprisingly, never heard the two terms used together in tandem. However, recently I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Harrison Atkins by phone and he hipped me up. Seems that "lace" signifies the genteel nature of women, while "crater" connotes what Atkins evidently believes is the "cratering", or demolition, of such feminine refinement. Straight up, folks, I'm not going to proclaim to entirely grasp how this notion applies in the context of what we are presented with in "Lace Crater". But then again, as I've also never really SEEN a film like what Atkins gives us here, either, I'm more than willing to go with it. This is without question one of THE most patently bizarro endings this reviewer has ever seen. Just about the best way I can even TRY to describe what happens is by way of this weighty quote by the great German writer Thomas Mann... "It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death." Or something relatively approximating that at any rate. I concluded our conversation by asking Atkins what he has percolating in terms of his next production. And while his answer was decidedly yet purposefully vague, the indication is that fans can expect more of the same surreal style of offbeat and unorthodox entertainment as we are treated to in "Lace Crater". Can not wait.

source: Lace Crater

The movie starts out somewhat slow. The concept behind this movie was rather interesting, but I could not get past Ruth's pompous friends. Why exactly does she associate with these people who are rotten towards her? Took away from the movie quite a bit. Most of the characters you could feel nothing for as a result.