boo_4ever
Don't Look Down starts off with two sisters being photographed on the edge of a huge drop. You know what will happen next, and the same can be said for the rest of the film.Some parts were eerie when you felt if might have a supernatural cause to it but the big finale was a complete cop out. A Saturday evening "thriller" in the vein of Murder She Wrote disguised as a Wes Craven horror film. Don't be fooled. I was bored throughout most of it and even a little bit angry at the end. The guy from Beverly Hills 90210 is in this for crying out loud. This is a terrible film which makes you wish the entire production team had fallen off that cliff.
TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews
When I sat down to watch this, I didn't know too much about it; what I knew was that Wes Craven was one of the producers, and that it was a made-for-TV movie. When it started, I quickly discovered that two things; one, it was one of those mystery thrillers, where you're supposed to guess who the killer is, and two, it's mainly made to scare those who suffer from acrophobia, fear of heights(hence the title). For a TV movie, the production is surprisingly good, and the film does contain a few intense scenes. Since I suffer from a mild case of acrophobia myself, I found plenty of scenes to be scary and intense(not to say that people who couldn't care less about heights won't find them so too, though). The plot is surprisingly good, and does hold water to some extent; I wouldn't call it great, but it's not really that far-fetched. The acting is decent, no going around that. All of the actors are unknowns, which could be(and probably is) why, but it could also be the direction, which, admittedly isn't great(but hey, this guy's only done series and half-bad movies before, so what do you expect?). The characters are well-written, and mostly avoid being overly cliché-like; apart from the lead, none of them seemed like stereotypes. The special effects were OK, not better nor worse than the standard for TV movies. Considering the production values, I was surprised by how much the film actually did manage to shock and frighten me. The mystery was very good; it kept me guessing throughout the film, and when the answer was revealed, I was very surprised. I thought I had considered every possible outcome, but the film still managed to surprise me with the twist. I'm not sure what to draw as a conclusion from that; maybe the films plot is actually good, but just surrounded by mediocrity in the acting, writing and to a certain extent, theme, which drags the film down to just being decent overall... or maybe I'm just easily manipulated. Who knows. All in all, a decent mystery thriller. I recommend it exclusively to big fans of mystery films and people who suffer from acrophobia; since both apply to me, I really enjoyed it. Pretty much everyone else should just skip this one. 5/10
Nicholas Rhodes
Found this one in Paris (under the title "Acrophobie") on dvd for 10 Euros and was not disappointed. Excellent picture quality, stunning scenes, and above all an unguessable "dénouement". Acting was very good if a little amateur and the mountain scenes were stunning. Also I was very happy to have this in picture ratio 4:3 ( which fills my tv set completely ) instead of the usual goddammned 16:9, or even worse 2;35 which leaves me with big black bars ! The story is quite mysterious, and obviously these are not well known actors but the performance is pretty good. Highly recommendable for the price !
