A few months ago Molly Reynolds (Gretchen Lodge) married Tim (Johnny Lewis) in a big church wedding all their families and friends were invited to. Well, almost all, for Molly's parents had died shortly before, but it appeared as though she was going to be able to put her bad times behind her, which included a spell as a heroin addict, and embrace her new life. So why was it now she was trying to film herself on a camcorder committing suicide by cutting her own throat? Was it something to do with the house she and Tim had moved into - the one in the Maryland woods which had belonged to her parents?
You'd think if you'd directed the most financially successful movie of all time, from a budget to takings ratio, that you'd never have to make another film again, hell, you'd probably never have to work again. But here was the co-director of The Blair Witch Project continuing to churn out the low budget horror flicks as if he wasn't a millionaire at all, and Lovely Molly was one of those, teasing the audience at first into thinking he would be replicating the style of his megahit with its highly influential found footage methods. There were scenes which had been filmed by the characters on home video, but they didn't make up the bulk of the story, as much of it took the form of a prowling camera following them about.
Not from anyone's point of view other than the audience's, though you could make the case we were watching from some supernatural perspective, then again it could be that aspect was all in Molly's head. Indeed, so intent in muddying the waters as to what was really going on was writer and director (and editor) Eduardo Sánchez that it looked as if he didn't have too firm a grasp of his tale, or rather he knew what was happening but wasn't too clear about conveying that to us watching. The result was a lot of angry movie watchers out there, aggrieved they had invested the time with an effort which rubbed its lack of coherence in their faces as if it was a stylistic and narrative choice.
You could argue Blair Witch ended with the reality of the situation up in the air and left to those watching to decide what exactly had happened, and plenty of people were sufficiently spooked by that to make it a hit, but that wasn't the case here. One major problem was that Molly seems to be lapsing into madness due to her childhood trauma, one she was afflicted by in the house she has moved back into, which begged the question why not sell the place and move into somewhere with far less anxious associations? It would certainly have saved everyone a lot of trouble and Molly a lot of heartache, and wasn't quite explained by a rather lazy device that she was losing her already fragile mind in the place as the demons of her past rose up to meet her once again.
Not only that, but it could be these are actual demons she is battling with, which offered more of a traditional horror movie slant on the premise, but tended to trivialise the spectre of child abuse which informed that plot. Was Molly exploited by her own father when she was a girl growing up in the isolated farmhouse, and further to that was he being exploited by a supernatural possession? Put like that, it was a misstep to use such an extremely non-entertaining incident in a film which was supposed to be offering enjoyable shivers, meaning Sánchez would have been better to ditch that because it didn't make his work more serious, it just made it stupid when there wasn't even anything constructive being put across in the process. What just about saved this was a performance from Lodge which was the kind usually described as "brave", meaning she was naked a lot, but look past that and you'd see her delivering a more convincing account of a traumatised personality than this deserved.
