BLU-RAY/DVD REVIEWS

I think not watching as many trailers lately has been doing me a lot of favours. I’ve found that over the past little while, trailers have increasingly given more and more of the movie away instead of just teasing. As a result, most of the movie winds up being summed up in the trailer and unless it looks really awesome, there’s no point in seeing it. When I saw the trailer for THE TALL MAN show up online, I passed on checking it out because it was billed as a horror/supernatural film. I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to scary movies, so I just figured I would pass on learning more. I didn’t even realize that THE TALL MAN was slated for a home video release until it showed up on my doorstep.

The genre and synopsis for the film gives us a very clouded idea of what this film is about. I initially thought it was going to be something like The Boogeyman or Darkness Falls. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The movie opens with statistics about missing children and then we start things off with a young woman painting a pretty bleak picture of a town that’s lost its livelihood. I don’t want to give too much away about the film since I enjoyed it a lot more knowing less, but it’s definitely NOT the film that’s been explained to you by its distributors. I don’t know why marketing teams do that. I know people who didn’t like this movie because they expected something dark and spooky and what they got was something else entirely.

So… first things first: I did, in fact, enjoy THE TALL MAN. I thought that it was a pretty interesting story that kept me guessing. It wasn’t a perfect movie and it wasn’t without its flaws, but by my standards, it was worth watching. I thought Jessica Biel pulled off a pretty good performance in the film. Again, not without flaws, but she played an interesting character and left me wondering whether or not she was justified in what went down. I don’t want to say more than that, but after you watch the film, you’ll understand.

Keep in mind that if you’re going to sit down and watch THE TALL MAN, it is NOT what it’s made out to be. And by that I mean that if you see this film on the shelves this October and decide to pick it up to watch as a spooky film for Halloween, you WILL be disappointed. The cover for the DVD and Blu-ray gives off a really eerie vibe and tricks you into thinking horror film, but really, this film is more of a crime drama thriller. If you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll likely also enjoy THE TALL MAN. If not (or if again, you pick it up thinking that it’s a horror film), you will probably feel a little gypped.

Deleted Scene: There is only one scene here and it’s an add-on to a scene from early on in the movie. It really doesn’t add too much more to the film and just kind of builds on the atmosphere. It doesn’t really make sense in the film though and I can definitely see why it would’ve been cut from the final thing.

Visual Concepts: This feature isn’t a behind-the-scenes or anything. It’s literally just the visual concepts for the film that have been illustrated pre-storyboards. Some of them are really neat and I enjoyed seeing the art, but it’s a pretty bland feature all-in-all.