Monstrous

 Monstrous is a Christina Ricci-led horror movie that... well, it's really hard to talk about without entering into spoiler territory. I'll try to keep them mild, but consider yourself warned.

 Ricci plays a woman moving in to a new town in California with her son, back at some point in the '50s.  They have trouble fitting in the new place, the son wants to go back, and it's increasingly apparent they're fleeing a bad domestic situation. And then a monster starts coming out of the lagoon out back to stalk first the boy, then his mother.

 There are a lot of problems with this film. The whole thing looks like a TV movie- which, for its obviously modest budget, it might as well be. This includes a be-tentacled, protean creature that's just not very scary, or even interesting to look at; part of it is that the CGI used for it looks cheap as hell, but it also doesn't really have a visual identity. The script also meanders a bit - the details do end up fitting together, but I didn't find the journey interesting at all, especially when most of the elements are borrowed from other, better movies. And yes, it does have a couple of gotcha! twists, one of which I guessed about a third of the way in, and the other so unnecessary that it barely counts as a twist.

The ghost of Alien sequels past

 I feel kind of bad for bashing on Monstrous - it's got a honest attempt at mindfuckery and a proper monster/ghost/spirit creature thing that they have come into focus in the background a few times, a type of shot I tend to enjoy. Effort was clearly expended in writing and making the film, what with all the foreshadowing and references to stuff to come, and it's got a good emotional core. Christina Ricci gives a good performance as well, even when half of her acting notes could as just well be "put on a brave face" and her dialog, as written is... often not great.

 But the thing is I found it pretty boring. It seemed to me that director Chris Sivertson and writer Carol Chrest were more interested in wrangling its puzzle into the shape of a movie rather than telling a good story, which will always be a problem with this sort of thing. And though a lot of the choices that render the movie problematic for most of its running time are deliberate and make sense in retrospect, it takes so long to make that clear that by the time the revelations come it's hard to give a shit.