They Reach

Director - Sylas Dall (The Blue Line, Hit Squad)

Starring - Mary Madaline Roe (The Ice Cream Date, Two Pictures), Morgan Chandler (Silence), and Eden Campbell (Z Nation, The Mortuary Collection)

Release Date - 2020

Genre - Horror

Tagline - "First you hear them.  Then you see them.  Then..."

Format - DVD (Personal Collection)

Rating (out of 5):

     Sometime ago, last year I believe, I received the press release for the horror tale They Reach.  The artwork looked fun and I was getting a Stranger Things vibe from it.  I marked it down to check out later but I forgot which is typical for me.  I look at so many movies through out the week for the site that I often lose count of which ones I was interested in and which ones didn't peak my interest.  A few days ago I was at a Walmart I typically don't visit when I saw that they had a bigger selection of movies than my local Walmart.  I snagged I Am Lisa, Sacrilege, and They Reach.  They Reach was the one I was the most excited to see so I put it at the end of my movie marathon.

     The film follows a young girl in 1979 who just lost her older brother.  Her parents are taking it hard but she finds herself following in her father's footsteps of tinkering on electronics.  She finds a box of junk at an old store and buys it when she discovers an broken cassette player in it.  While working on it she accidentally cuts her hand.  What she doesn't know is that the recording on the cassette is of a failed exorcism.  Her blood on the tape opens up a portal allowing a darkness to enter this world and take over her small town.  It's up to her and her two friends to stop them before everyone they love dies.  

     Stranger Things did a lot for the genre.  It made horror and sci-fi more trendy than what it already was and gave production companies a bigger reason to take a chance with horror.  With that being said, it didn't really do anything new or inventive.  It gave nostalgia hungry millennials something to watch.  Now, we are getting movies that are ripping the show off in the same way the market became oversaturated with zombie films after The Walking Dead premiered.  They Reach is extremely inspired by Stranger Things but the film struggled to find it's own footing.  The acting in this one is very well done.  The relatively young cast delivers a great performance that rivaled shows of films featuring casts of the same age.  The budget for this one is nowhere near that of Stranger Things, It, and so on but this cast delivers just as good of a performance as the actors in those.  They work very well together and their characters were extremely fun to watch.  The supporting cast is just as great.  I loved the casting in this one.  The story for this one is one of the biggest missed opportunities in horror history.  The movie goes in too many different directions.  We get the story centered around kids who have these creatures after them that are afraid of light.  This was a solid premise but we then have moments where this children oriented movie goes extremely dark and gruesome which is not how the film was set up.  It's out of place but if the film would have went that way from the very beginning it could have worked.  We then have these random scenes scattered throughout that are extremely light-hearted and even more out of place than the darker scenes.  The writing in this is very inconsistent which created an inconsistent film that falls short.  Finally, the film has some extremely bloody moments but the deaths, sadly, take place off screen.  We get some blood splatter at various times throughout the film but if you are looking for practical effects and fun deaths you will be disappointed.  Overall, They Reach was such a missed opportunity.  The story could have been one hell of a horror flick but the movie struggles with itself.  It has some fun moments as it is but don't expect a movie that will stick with you.