The Mooring

Touching Realism and Some Real Tension
“The Mooring” is more affecting than the usual crazed-stalker-in-the-woods film. It cares enough to lend some plausibility to the girls’ predicament. A group of young women are sent out on a milder “Outward Bound” sort of excursion away from their accustomed urban comforts. All of them have been compulsive over-users of cell phone and Internet technology, sometimes with serious consequences. So there’s a reason for their being set down in the woods without a working cell phone among them.

Then the conversation here is much more realistic than the usual film-version of conversation among teens before they start getting picked off by backwoods psychopaths. While the two-hour limitations of the film doesn’t allow us to get to know all nine girls very well, we do get a glimpse of some of their distinctive personalities. What’s most refreshing is that these girls’ conversation isn’t limited to foul-mouthed belligerence...

Surprisingly Good Slasher Film
Thomas Wilson Brown is perfect as the creepy villain. This is more of a suspense/thriller than a horror film, and that's not a bad thing. You actually feel sorry for these girls because they look like actual high school girls, not typical Hollywood mid-to-late twenty year olds. The thing I really liked about The Mooring was that it's not your typical slasher film, yes there's plenty of that, but it paces nicely. Sure, I would have liked to see more of a background on why the killer became crazy, but there are plenty of surprises and the cinematography was really impressive for being a low budget indie film. Definitely worth an evening watch. You'll never think of the river the same again!

HOW DO YOU MOVE THE HORSE?
The Mooring comes across as two separate films. The first half consists of a group of giggly young girls going camping/boating. They are all in trouble due to their addiction to the electronic media: i.e shyness, accident while texting, cyber bullying, writing Amazon reviews etc. They give up the gizmo world and are assigned tasks like "write a hand written letter" or play a board game...things they have difficult doing. I really liked this aspect of the movie as the effect the electronic media has had on society still lacks data points.

This was a way to build character and to eliminate cell phones before it digresses into a bad abduction story with a guy who plays violent video games and has trouble relating to people.

The main problem I had was there were too many girls to get to know. It was difficult to establish all those characters. The second problem I had was that the first half of the picture was pretty darn decent as a separate film. I resented the...

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