I am a sucker for fairy tale stuff, as are a lot of people these days, hence the sheer amount of fairy tale re-envisionings.  If it’s not a superhero movie, it’s a fairy tale modernization nowadays.  This is what led me to The Curse of Sleeping Beauty – that, and hearing that it was a trippy retelling of the tale.

Summary:  A guy (I forgot his name already, movie ended 10 minutes ago) is having dreams about a beautiful woman he wants to kiss.  Her headpiece is big and annoying for people with OCD because one side has 4 gems dangling from it, the other 5.  Just as he’s about to kiss her the dream becomes a haunted house nightmare.  His psychologist (the third, we find out, in a year) tells him he needs to have friends.  This is the first, and last time we see her.

Then he inherits THE VERY HOUSE FROM HIS DREAMS.  Oh my god, trippy and unexpected, right?  He goes there and it’s run down and creepy.  There’s a letter from a family member he never met apologizing for leaving him ‘this curse. . .and this blessing’ dun dun DUN.  A woman comes to the house looking for her brother who she believes disappeared there.  Apparently a number of people have disappeared and the town thinks the house is haunted.

There’s something about if the guy leaves the house he gets bad stomach cramps.  Then he and the girl, we’re told, are falling for each other.  He finds a book with a spinning wheel on the cover.  They are attacked by mannequins for some reason and flee to her ex-boyfriend’s house (who she only dated twice, she says) and he agrees to take that ancient spinning wheel book, written in a foreign language, and use his many computers to translate it because he’s asian, and therefore a computer whiz.  Also, therefore, will never get the girl.  Go B-movie Hollywood.  Oh yeah, and suddenly there’s this paranormal investigator guy that talks about Islam and the Quran and stuff, and satan.

Before everything is translated, the guy’s cramps set in.  They decide to go back to the house and have him kiss the beautiful woman who suddenly has found that fifth gem that was missing.  This helps my OCD and fixation on the unevenness, but not the movie.  More mannequins attack, a Djinn is chained to a spinning wheel and the girl distracts it while the boy goes to find Sleeping Beauty in some weird steampunk ventilator thing he magically knows how to operate.  He kisses her, then realizes he needs to kiss her with his blood, she awakens and OMG PLOT TWIST the asian guy translates that the sleeping girl is the real demon but too late, dude.  Bitch is up now and she hasn’t had chocolate in AGES and probably really needs to use the bathroom.  But first – the Apocalypse.

The Good:  Uhm.  Some of the visuals are pretty sweet.  The opening ones especially, with Sleeping Beauty in the desert and then the Jacob’s Ladder flashbackiness to things.  And hey, there’s an Asian guy.  I mean, he’s totally still just the smart guy who can’t get the girl but it’s not often that the token non-white person is anything but black right?  Right?  Am I reaching here?  Probably, yeah.  *sigh*

The Bad:  Read that summary again.  It flips all over the place.  It’s predictable.  It’s like a Syfy movie that wants to be taken seriously.  Sharknado without the sharks and wanting to be real cinema, I guess.  Or Sharknado with the sharks wanting legitimacy.  How odd that my spellcheck does not say I have spelled Sharknado wrong.  I use that word enough in my daily typing that it is in the dictionary now.

The acting is also not great.  I get no connection between any of the characters, whatsoever.  Characters are dropped and added randomly.  Special effects are pretty damn weak, too.  The main demon that is NOT sleeping beauty, the mouth movements aren’t even close to what the words are supposed to be coming out of them.  I don’t GET the mannequins.  There’s a scene with the demon at the spindle surrounded by doll body parts but nothing even trying to explain how one spindles plastic body parts.  You don’t know why they are there or where they are coming from and it all changes.  So much is, sadly, clichéd movie making.

The Female:  The Girl is looking for her brother – her quest is led by a missing man and she talks about her brother or the Guy who she falls for, apparently because they kiss.  There isn’t another living female in this world for her to talk to.  She knows how to use an ax, sort of, and gets choked by various demons.

The Sleeping Beauty is Briar Rose and a demon.  She is damsel in distress until she releases the souls of the damned and brings about the apocalypse.  Of course, when you need a man’s help you’re pretty and well-groomed, but when you are mad at the dude and want to kill the world suddenly your hair is all stringy with white streaks and your clothes get dirty and old, IDK.  Fashion isn’t kind to the women with visions of sovereignty, methinks.

The Psychiatrist is a woman, but she has one line maybe before disappearing.