Run, Hide, Die is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad movie. I struggle with writing reviews for movies like this. I don’t want to just bash a movie to death. I want to try and point out some positive moments. Unfortunately when it comes to Run, Hide, Die I just don’t think such moments exist. This is a movie that failed across the board.
The plot is pretty standard for a slasher. 5 friends, all girls, go out to a cabin in the woods to have a weekend getaway. It’s the one year anniversary of the death of one of the girls’ husbands and this will allow her to take her mind off of it and just have some fun with her friends. It’s starts off well enough. The girls are drinking, hanging around a campfire and in general enjoying themselves. The audience isn’t enjoying themselves, but the girls are.
One of the girls is an actress and her latest film is a horror movie so she brings the script out and tries to get some of the other girls to read lines with her so she can record it. As she says multiple times, she wants to make sure she doesn’t look like a “retard” when it comes to actually filming the movie. This is what every young actress fears, right? Nobody wants to look “retarded” on screen.
The movie has a short running time of about 75 minutes. That’s a plus, but even then the pacing is bad. Nothing transitions or runs smoothly. The movie feels like little snippets of things put together. This causes the 75 minutes to feel long and boring. A movie under 80 minutes should under no circumstances ever feel like it’s 2 and a half hours.
It’s at about the 30 minute mark that Run, Hide, Die introduces it’s killer. How it gets there I’m not exactly sure. Two of the girls get in a tent, which is weird because they’re all staying in a fairly large cabin together. Once in the tent they’re attacked by someone with what appears to be maybe a Swiss army knife? I’m not positive, but its a very little pocket knife. During this time the would-be killer manages to round up all 5 girls and tie them up inside the house. Then we see the killer. It’s an old lady. How this old lady tied up all these girls so quickly by herself is a mystery. Furthering the mystery is why the girls all just stay there (they’re not tied up well) when the old lady takes turns yelling at them one by one. They could easily take her down, but they don’t.
Eventually two of the girls escape briefly. It’s quite amazing how they do so. They’re hands and feet are tied with zip ties. One of the girls manages to get one of her earrings out and proceeds to slice the zip ties with the back of earring. I could buy this, but it would take a long time to cut through the zip ties with the back of an earring. In Run, Hide, Die that task takes mere seconds!
The last half hour of the movie is just the girls tied up in the house as the old yells at them and “tortures” them. The girls are screaming the whole time. You can’t make out a word of dialogue for a good 20-25 minutes. Literally nothing but screaming. All the screaming apparently cause the cinematographer to have a seizure because the camera just starts swinging around like crazy. For almost the entire last half of the movie you can’t hear or see what is going on. It’s just all nonsense. Then it ends.
I don’t know why anyone would watch this. The characters are uninteresting and annoying. The plot is typical and the movie lacks any real style. The dialogue, when you can actually hear it, is juvenile at best. The neon font used during the opening credits is kind of cool though. So there’s that.
Run, Hide, Die will be available on DVD, VOD & Digital Video on September 1, 2015 from Image Entertainment.
