Knife Edge (2009): A Macabre Review.

Starring Natalie Press, Hugh Bonneville, Nigel Whitmey

Directed by Anthony Hickox

So the other night I felt like watching something that I never heard of that sounded like it might be at least tolerable.  As it so happened, I stumbled across the British movie Knife Edge, so I thought "what the hell, let's give it a go."  What can I say?  I'm a gambling man.  Well, not so much where actual money is concerned.  Sorry, getting off track here.  I don't want to waste too much time here, so let's get started.

Knife Edge centers around Emma Pollock, a very successful Wall Street trader decides to hang up her metaphorical hat to move to England with her husband Henri and son Tomas, in a sprawling mansion in the countryside.  I found it funny that throughout the movie people call it merely a house, when if attempted you could probably fit a small community comfortably within its walls.

"Cut!! Looks like we got our facial expression for the poster."

It doesn't take long for weird things to start happening to Emma.  She starts to see visions of things that happened in and around the house, these things mostly revolving around people being murdered, which are possibly otherworldly cries for help.  Oh, did I mention Emma has some level of psychic abilities?  She very briefly mentions it to her nanny, and it's so casual a thing brought up you'd think she was talking about something simple like a new lipstick she was trying out.

Meanwhile, her husband Henri is facing serious issues with his company, to the point that it looks like he may have to close up shop.  He is too ashamed to ask his wife for money, so instead he looks for help from her brother instead, in which they hatch a scheme to spike Emma's medication to make her seem crazy, allowing Henri to take control of her estate and having all her money at his disposal.  The burning question is, will Emma successfully make sense of the visions she's having and also figure out what her husband is doing to her?

"I'm beginning to think Elisabeth Bathory is full of shit!!"

I have to admit, the movie at least kept me guessing as to what the hell was going on and what was going to happen.  And the cinematography was pretty good compared to what I see nowadays.  But that's pretty much where I stop with the positives.  The acting is not that great overall.  I've certainly seen worse, but I've definitely seen much better.  In terms of pure horror, this really doesn't deliver.  The visions Emma has are admittedly interesting, and as time (and the spiked medication) continues, the visions get weirder and weirder.  But the movie didn't scare me at all, and that doesn't bode well in a blog that reviews horror movies.

If there was one more positive I could throw at it, it's that I didn't get angry at how bad this movie was, which seems to be a little more commonplace for me than it used to be.  But my suggestion is for you to avoid Knife Edge.  There are many, many other superior British horror movies out there.  Watch those instead.  Rest in peace.

Macabre Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars