Enter the Dangerous Mind (2013)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Maybe Biting a bit more than They can Chew, these Low-Budget Filmmakers are on Shaky Ground when it comes to the Conceit Proclaiming its Ability to Convey the Inner-Workings of a very Troubled Psyche.But, the Movie does Manage to be somewhat Intriguing and somewhat Complex for such a Minimum working Budget. The Movie Looks Good and the Soundtrack is Reflective of its Pathological subject matter. It is want to Give Us more than it can Deliver. Combing, Stalker, Serial-Killer, and Horror Movie Tropes, the Film manages to Touch these Things for an OK Entertainment, there just isn't Enough Time or Money to Due any of it Justice and it Ends Up being an Average B-Movie at Best and a big Disappointment at Worst.Still, Worth a Watch for Fans of the Psychological Thriller and B-Movies, it is more Emotional than Visceral, so those expecting a lot of the Red Stuff will No Doubt come Un-Glued and Eviscerate.

I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but just to be safe, I'm marking this as possibly containing spoilers. For starters, if it hadn't been for the horrific, disturbing "music" I would have given this 7 stars. As it was, with the "music" being completely unbearable, I turned on the captioning & turned the volume almost off (I was streaming on Netflix). Unless you're as mentally disturbed as the lead character, I advise you to do the same.All the actors did a good job portraying their characters, believably.The story and subject matter were actually pretty interesting to me and and I rarely like or watch bloody horror films, what is what I consider this to be - just my opinion.I think this is the first film I've seen that gave me, I think, a realistic view of what it's like to suffer from schizophrenia - hearing voices and experiencing hallucinations.All in all, not too bad. Unfortunately, I think the "music" was overdone and not necessary to portray the mental illness of a couple of the characters - which is, what I think the film makers believed would be helpful. It was not and it brought my rating down, considerably.

Enter the Dangerous Mind had a great concept that was refreshing and extremely cerebral, honestly, it sounded great. Unfortunately for anyone looking forward to this film, this was quite possibly not only one of the worst films I've seen in a while but it also features some of the worst acting I've seen since Troll 2. The only way to describe this film in a nutshell is that it is like watching Uwe Boll emulate Nicolas Winding Refn. It is horrendous. The story follows a young dubstep DJ by the name of Jim who falls for a beautiful social worker only to have voices in his head drive him insane. While this sounds like a nice blend of cerebral psychological romantic drama mixed with a bit of horror, it is anything but. It is essentially a terribly acted film about the outcast getting the pretty girl only to have his nerves get the best of him in the form of inner demon voices that tell him to do terrible things by the end of it all. The acting in this film is abysmal, starring a slew of B-movie actors such as Jake Hoffman, Thomas Dekker, and Nikki Reed, it sinks in a matter of seconds as the acting gets to be so bad that you start to question whether this is supposed to be a hard hitting psycho-drama or a really bad comedy. My biggest problem with this film is Hoffman as Jim. He is unbelievable in every frame and approaches his character's musical tendencies as if he doesn't have a clue. Now, I'm not sure how Hoffman prepared for this role but judging from what we see on screen, I doubt he even knew what dubstep was let alone how to make it. Nikki Reed wasn't as bad as the rest of the pack, but it still would have been nice to see her try just a little bit. The true artistic criminals here are the directors, Youssef Delara and Victor Teran, the latter being the screenwriter as well. Delara and Teran have absolutely no idea how to keep up the pace. Just because your film is a brisk 88 minutes, doesn't mean that it is automatically going to be paced well. Quite the contrary, this film is paced terribly and has no balance to it whatsoever. One minute we're in a love story, the next minute we are plagued by Delara and Teran's half assed attempts at cerebral cinema, it makes for a brutally and painfully boring film that never clicks. Overall, if you have the chance to see this film, don't...run as far and as fast as you can and if you think you're far enough, you're not, keep running until you forget the name of this terrible, ridiculous attempt at a really cool concept.

**********SOME SPOILERS*************I wasn't expecting much from this when I looked on IMDb before watching it. Turns out that the movie is lingering, dark, and realistic. A couple of made-for-TV style moments, but nothing that really detracted. In terms of the acting, I was engaged by it and felt there was subtlety and nuance.It did a good job of defining the line between softer and empathetic approaches to extreme mental health issues and the medical model which aims to kill and destroy deviant and unacceptable thoughts and behaviours. I liked the interplay of these opposing views. Raised interesting questions like how far would a compassionate person (in this case, a well devised figure of a social worker) go to protect human life. And when do we apply judgement/control and when should we have mercy/empathy on people that don't share common human values with the "rest of us". Seems that we are no closer to knowing how to regard the extraordinary functioning of the human psyche.