Horror Movie Review: The Gown (2019)

Written and directed by Alan Casper, The Gown is an amateurish horror with far too many problems to overlook. From bad acting, to bad visuals and even worse audio, it’s a struggle to sit through its 99 minutes.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Gown…a movie about a cursed wedding dress comes in at nearly two hours. That can only mean one of two things. Either we’re getting detailed characters, stories and loads of history about this cursed wedding dress or it’s 75% filler and padding.

Take a guess which one it is.

The Gown is a ‘zero’ budget horror. That in itself is not a problem as we admire filmmakers who are able to churn out a decent flick out of nothing. Unfortunately, what The Gown churns out is so poor, it would be a genuine surprise if anyone makes it through to the end. We here at Games, Brrraaains & Head-Banging Life have made it a personal mission to never turn off a movie. No matter how bad it is. We’ve sat through The Wicker Man Remake and we consider that one of the worst movies ever made.

We came close with The Gown on several occasions.

The story is not deep. We have Jessica (Ally Matteodo) who is so desperate to get married that she gives her boyfriend an ultimatum. Propose or leave. He chooses the former and so she starts planning a wedding.

The couple don’t have much money so her hope of her dream wedding is off the cards. However, Jessica will happily cut corners in every department except the dress. You see, she has started to have dreams about a specific dress and now she must have it.

Luckily for her, her sister finds one that matches the description and when Jessica goes to collect it, finds that the owner is more than glad to get rid of it. So much so, that she gives it to her for free.

Jessica is over the moon but she shouldn’t be as the dress is cursed.

The plot is wafer-thin and the film can’t sustain it for the lengthy running time. This means we get really lengthy scenes of characters practising speeches, searching the internet, having the same conversations over and over again.

That not a single character is engaging is one problem. However, another is the weak acting and diabolical dialogue. Some of the conversations are so poor you start to wonder if they’re even human.

The cringe-worthiness of it all is enough to give it a really low rating but we’re not done yet. Putting the fetid and rotten bow on this trash pile is the horrendous combination of the cinematography and sound. It looks awful, the locations are so bland and the sound alternates between unlistenable and deafening.

Avoid.