Conjure

The Details:
Directed by: Matt Busch
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color

The Review:
I feel like my patience has just gone through the most painfully rigorous test imaginable.

For those not in-the-know, Conjure is a horror flick from the "Rock Star of Illustration," Matt Busch. Even if you've never heard Busch's name, you have more than likely seen his work on everything from Star Wars to The Crow to The Lord of The Rings. Being an artist myself, I truly admire his incredible talent and style. This movie on the other hand is an entirely different story.

The plot is a thrown-together (literally, watch the extras) cluster-fuck of mammoth proportions. Matt runs across an old photograph of a castle while wandering through a graveyard. It was "calling his name," so he took it and decided to paint it. After beginning the painting, he and his foxy-wife-with-an-attitude, Sarah, begin to have strange experiences. They hear slowed-down and reversed voices, beverages slide across tables, you know, the usual. They eventually get sucked into the painting and wake up in front of the creepy old castle, and that's when the movie really picks up...uhhh...not really.


Everything about this movie is bad in the worst kind of way. The acting is terrible and so stone-dry it's rarely amusing. The ghosts are the very definition of generic, with their tattered clothes, white make-up and darkened eyes. Not to mention they are a blatant rip-off of The Ring, with frames removed from their motion to make them "jump" towards the viewer. The soundtrack is an obtrusive annoyance of royalty free stock-horror garbage. Star Wars wipes are used to transition from scene to scene. And worst of all, it doesn't seem like a mere 3 minutes can go by without a "scary" flash-frame image of a lame ghost or scrawled-on-wall, complete with a loud TV-interference blast of noise. Seriously, if they took all the flash-frame images out of this movie and put them side by side, I bet it would make a 10-minute animation. Of course, the animation wouldn't really be an "animation" because all of the flash-frames are nearly identical.

Speaking of repetition, we get to see Matt browse through his "scary" little necronomicon-style sketchbook over, and over, and over, and over... There are never any new drawings to see either, he will simply flip through the same 3 or 4 drawings! This happens repeatedly throughout the entire sorry excuse for a movie!

Watching the making of and behind the scenes footage on the DVD makes it an even bigger disaster. Matt, Sarah and crew really feel like they have made a good, scary low-budget movie. Matt praises Sarah's PATHETIC acting, Shawn Sheehan (the "let's use After-Effects everywhere we possibly can" guy) praises everything that Matt does, and Matt himself goes on and on about how proud he is of it. It's really just a big complementary circle of vomit-inducing fluff.

Now about Matt and his self-indulgent attempt at filmmaking...the beginning has a documentary style introduction of who Matt is, how he grew up, and takes a look at the high-profile illustration career he's had. He explains in the making of that he decided to put this in the movie because he wasn't sure people would know he is. WHO CARES WHO YOU ARE MATT!!! This is a horror movie, not an E! True Hollywood Story! Concentrate on THE MOVIE, concentrate ON A DECENT SCRIPT!!! It really seems like it's only there to appease Matt's ego, and it's one of about 50 things in Conjure that irritates me to no end.

The only people that could find any kind of enjoyment out of this movie are the Matt Busch fanboys. Chances are, even they will probably want to pound their head against the wall repeatedly while watching it. Hopefully Matt actually PLANNED OUT his next movie that's in the works, otherwise the world is going to have another throw-away piece of plastic like this to deal with. However, there were two moments in this movie that gave me an enormous laugh, and I've made them available below. Do yourself a favor and just watch these two clips so you don't have to torture yourself with the rest!

So Matt, if you happen to read this, stick to the illustration buddy!

MEDIA: (Quicktime 7 required)
Matt Busch being, like...possessed or something.
Thrilling suspense involving a knife.



SCARY GHOSTS?: If you've never seen a horror movie.
STORYLINE?: Made up on the fly and boy does it show.
MATT BUSCH?: Pick up your pencil and brush again!