Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Julian (Christopher Egan) pretty much has it all clicking for him right now in his young life. He’s a world class Tae Kwon Do martial artist, he’s got a pretty girlfriend, he’s got some quality mates, and he’s just months away from getting his degree in architecture. This movie ‘Crush’ is taking place in Australia and Jules is an American with the reasons for him being Down Under referring back to a time when things weren’t so great for Jules, but we aren’t going to get into all of that because they didn’t bother to get into all of that in this movie.

Just when things looked like they couldn’t get any better for Jules, a professional House Sitter by trade, I guess… he gets the gig to watch over the incredible house of this incredibly wealthy dude which gives Jules the opportunity to study and train and make sweet love to his girl Clare (Brooke Harmon) in the lap of luxury. Sweet. The rich guy did mention his niece who will be stopping by on occasion for a dip in the pool but whatever, life sure is good when you are young, handsome and in love.

Then the niece stops by. This would be Anna (Emma Lung). Anna looks like she has a little touch of whore in her which is cool and all as long as one does not partake. Oh well. Now that Julian has sampled this tasty fruit, repeatedly, strange things are happening. The dreams, which are horrible, are coming non-stop. It seems as if the house is possessed as doors open and close without warning. Somebody emails Julian’s girlfriend from the home computer informing her on how he’s been tapping that ass on the side. His schoolwork has gone all to hell and his training is shot. Now things aren’t so good for Julian no more. But wait, it gets worse. Julian soon learns the truth about this Anna and it’s not a good truth either. Think of the bastard love child that would be produced between Freddy Krueger and Samara from ‘The Ring’ and then take away all their good points. It’s not looking for my man.

‘Crush’ has a few things working for in its favor and about the same number of things working against it. For starters this movie is really, really short. The movie opens with

this Tae-Kwon-Do competition which takes a good five or so minutes and it ends with another five minutes worth of credits so it was all the filmmakers could to do to stretch this movie out to an appropriate length to make it qualify to be a feature length motion picture. On one hand this means that this is a movie that won’t take too much of your time, on the other hand it does leave a lot of little points and issues flopping around in the wind. There is a laundry list of things but just to point out a few, such as the rich guy going to the trouble to teach Jules how to use his super fancy surveillance system, which I’m sure was introduced for a reason, but yet Jules steadfastly refused to use it which really would’ve come in handy for the boy a couple of times. There’s a picture of Anna with the family and once we learn who Anna is are we to believe that this picture was all part of a dream? Anna’s version of the story and the rich dude’s reaction to Jules when he told her Anna was hanging out there actually worked better than the actual story the movie gave us to swallow. THIS IS A SPOILER MOMENT and this is also more personal but if someone tells me that the woman I’ve been sexing has been dead for a few months, I’m not spending the night there anymore. No sir, not the kid. There are a lot of things that were introduced in this movie, items and situations that looked as if they would have some relevance, that I imagine time and budget simply didn’t allow this movie to properly develop in any kind of reasonable way which did hurt this movie.

But in defense of ‘Crush’ it does appear that directors Jeffrey Gerritsen and John V. Soto were biding there time until they could get to the final act of this movie and this why I have to ultimately recommend this movie because that was really well done. Sure, we admit it shouldn’t have happened because once we learned the woman in the pool has been dead all this time the movie would’ve been over for most people, but when Anna reveals herself as what she really is, ‘Crush’ turns into a full blown semi-legitimate horror movie and now we have something we can halfway work with. Even though the problems we mentioned earlier still exist they just aren’t as important now as we have a man being chased by a monstrous ghoul, and we like monstrous ghouls, and this part of the movie required very little back story, loose ends didn’t matter as much as all that was required was some skill in making this section effective, and an actor who knew how to act scaredy, and all of this was there in this final act.

We are the last person to suggest that someone make a movie longer than it is because usually we just get longer junk, but this is one with a little added padding to iron out some of the blatant narrative oversights would’ve done ‘Crush’ a world of good. We did end up liking this movie but only by the skin of its teeth as it looked like it could’ve been much, much better.