Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

The woman, Rachel (Anna Skellern) is dressed in a tight red dress and high heels and she is looking good. While actress Anna Skellern is certainly one of the four stars of this movie ‘Siren’, I’m thinking her body is the more of the main character than the woman herself because it is fairly amazing and it is always on display. Clothed though, so don’t run out and get this if you think you’re about to witness some kind of nudity fest. Freaks. Regardless, she’s standing on a deserted backroads street when a car full of dudes drives right by her. They don’t even catcall. I find that hard to believe. Fortunately the stranger drives up in his BMW. Actually it’s not a stranger at all, just Rachel’s man Ken (Eoin Macken) since these crazy kids like to do that wacky role playing thing. What does this role playing nonsense have to do with anything that’s about to happen in this movie? I’m not really sure, but it’s probably just an excuse to squeeze Anna Skellern in a tight red dress.

Anyway, Rachel and Ken have secured the company yacht for a trip to some lovely resort area, and along for the ride is Rachel’s ex-boyfriend Marco (Anthony Jabre) who Ken has never met before this day. Why my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend is going along on a trip with me and my girl is a little confusing, but there it is. For disclosure’s sake another lady was supposed to show up, but given she didn’t show up Marco would’ve had to stay at home if it were up to me.

So they set sail on the blue seas. I don’t know if Ken really and truly cares for Rachel, but he sure likes having sex with her since he turns controls of the boat over to Marco so he can loudly handle his business below deck.

Then Marco sees the strange guy on the beach off in the distance who apparently needs some help. Personally, F-that guy. I know that’s what Ken would’ve done since he’s a bit of an ass, but he’s below deck doing other stuff. Marco, however, wants to help this guy and runs the boat into shallow water. We’re not going to worry about that guy that needed help because he’s a little beyond help at this point and time, but since the boat is stalled and since they are in the middle nowhere, they might as well set up shop and hang out at this deserted island beachfront until somebody coasts by.

Guess what, this island isn’t so deserted. There’s a weird, quiet hot chick named Silka (Tereza Srbova) running around this island. We should mention that the strange old dude at the dock told us the story of the siren, which probably should’ve been a hint and half to our crew that weird hot chicks who tend to materialize out of nowhere should be avoided. Nonetheless it’s not long before the strangeness starts happening. The crazy bloody hallucinations, Rachel’s sudden desire to be a lesbian, the dead bodies and Silka’s awful singing. Seriously, Silka’s siren song probably kills because it sucks so bad.

What we need is for the boat to start to work so we can get off this island and we also need Rachel to regain control of her heterosexuality so she can leave Silka behind, so we can get off this island. Maybe if Ken wasn’t so quick on the trigger… I’m just saying is all.

First thing we need to do is prompt you to ignore that box cover over there. That woman’s body on the cover isn’t in the movie, nobody’s holding any bloody knives and those two women flanking the non-existent woman on the cover can’t be in the movie since there’s only two women in the movie. Ignore all of that.

As far as the movie inside of that misleading box cover, the problem with ‘Siren’ is that there simply isn’t a lot of movie here. It’s a very brief film with a running time of 80 minutes, including credits, and it has a cast of basically four people in two locations and there’s not a lot for these people to do for these 80 or so minutes. Thus what they did have to do, they did it over and over again, such as hallucinate, run, settle down and then do it one more time, with other elements presented as filler. Take the opening scene with the tight red dress. During their little role playing tryst Rachel sees an eye staring at her through a hole in the wall. I don’t know if that meant something, since the eye wasn’t really there, or was this simply stuck in to justify padding the movie with a role playing scene? In fact Rachel was hallucinating long before they got the island and heard Silka’s awful song, so I don’t know if she was born to be a Siren herself or what. If she was, let’s just hope she has a better song. I’m not sure if the song of the siren even affects women.

But despite the repetitive nature of ‘Siren’ and the fact it probably could’ve gotten by as an episode of ‘The Outer Limits’ we weren’t completely disappointed with this movie. Director Andrew Hull offers up some interesting images for us to look at and despite the fact that there didn’t seem to be enough story to support the length of this movie, I still never felt bored or was disinterested while watching it, and lest we forget that Anna Skellern gave a very strong performance which helped carry this movie through to the bitter end.

I don’t know if would recommend ‘Siren’ because there’s not a lot substance, not a lot of depth, it’s classified as horror but it certainly isn’t that, but it had its moments and it was nice to look at. Not high praise perhaps, not praise at all actually, but it is what we have for you today.