A young woman named Allie (Kailin See) is searching for her father, an investigative reporter who also, by chance, happens to be a total nutjob. Allie’s old man has gone on back home to Overcast-Ville Canada to find out once and for all what happened to the twelve kids that turned up murdered with their mouths sewed shut some twenty years ago. This little horror movie is called ‘The Seamstress’ which kind of makes sense since the perpetrator of these crimes sews the victims mouths shut, but the woman that the good town folk of Overcast-Ville hijacked, tortured and burned to death was a school teacher and as far as I can tell had no sewing skills whatsoever. But I might have missed that part.

Back to Allie, she arrives at her old hometown packing heat and asking tough questions. Her friends, all from the same town, are worried about Allie and decided to join her on her little exploratory search for her old man. I think we all know that this is a collective bad move by these young people. While waiting for her future dead friends to arrive, Allie makes a visit to the cat that was the sheriff during those terrible days, one Virgil Logan (Lance Henricksen) where the pair engage in a completely incompressible shouting match with one another. From what I could glean from this it looks like Allie has come to the conclusion that the sheriff killed her father though how she came to this conclusion is beyond me.

Eventually the friends make it down and Allie has gotten the 411 that all of the answers she is searching for are located on some small uncharted island. Allie’s ex-boyfriend Jason (David Kopp) has a boat so off these young people go. Guess what? The boat breaks down. Guess What? Jason’s boat doesn’t have a radio. Guess what? There are no cell phone towers nearby. Guess what? Despite all of these issues, the cold weather, the weird sounds, Allie waking up from nightmares screaming her head off and the odd dude named Ryan (Aaron Pearl) who has appeared from nowhere, apparently lives on this deserted island and has warned these kids to stay on the beach and don’t enter the woods… all of these young people are still horny. Except Allie of course because final girls, generally speaking, don’t like sex all that much.

What we’re waiting for is young, attractive, obnoxious adults without cell phone service to start dying. Eventually it happens even though we don’t really get to see a lot of them die which, admittedly, was disappointing. Who is killing these kids? The seamstress is of course, because she seeks revenge for being done wrong. Why is she killing these kids who haven’t done anything to anybody except be obnoxious? Well, that’s a little confusing. Apparently, as they tell us repeatedly in this movie, the rules have changed. The problem is I didn’t what the rules were in the first place and I certainly don’t what these rules are now. The only thing I do know for sure is that irritating but attractive young adults are dying and that is something. What would be cool is if the seamstress took out the final girl too as Allie might be the most unpleasant final girl in the history of final girls.

We really can’t sugarcoat this one too much my friends because ‘The Seamstress’ is a movie that is fairly lousy. It is a short movie, I mean if you eliminate opening and ending credits it doesn’t even crack seventy minutes, and while we do appreciate a crap movie that doesn’t waste our time, this one probably could’ve used just a touch more exposition to help tell its somewhat confusing story. Or, instead of actually being longer, director Jesse James Miller could’ve gotten rid of that Death / Symbol / Seamstress / Scary Image Montage transition that Team Seamstress used in this movie over and over and over again. Could’ve completely gotten rid of that and had two extra minutes to fill with sense making stuff.

It’s too bad really because the movie had some potential. One of the reasons I opted for this flick is because the trailer was kind of sweet showing the seamstress as a mystical smoky Nightcrawler from the X-men type monster, and while this was true, apparently the budget only allowed for some extremely sporadic use of the creature that headlines this opus. That’s disappointing. Another positive was the over cast Canadian woods made for a solid atmosphere which should’ve made for a suitably spooky creepy movie watching experience but that wasn’t happening either. Instead we got a story filled with standard horror conventions, i.e., non-working cell phones, mystical people showing up giving sage advice which is systematically ignored, a desire for sexual activity at inappropriate times (no nudity however so you freaks out there don’t go looking for that), the planets most abrasive final girl and a chronic masturbator. Okay, so the masturbator might be somewhat unique but I think we all can agree that’s a little bit originality that we could’ve done without.

I’m afraid there’s not much to recommend here. A nice creature that was woefully underused placed inside a story that couldn’t connect its own dots. A must only for Lance Henricksen completists… which oddly enough I happen to be. Sucks to be me.