Aszura

This is the first Moroccan horror movie with a monster. This story of a group of old childhood friends who had a traumatic experience with an unknown monster as a children, then lost their memory over time and now set out to confront the monster again to prevent the mysterious disappearance of children in the area, would be quite decent, if it didn't so noticeably resemble It by Stephen King. Imagine King's novel crammed into a 90-minute film, missing all of the psychology of the characters and most of the scary moments (the film is only minimally scary and the monster is an ugly digital version in places) and you have a leaky and sometimes somewhat confused story fragment, moreover with not very convincing actors and poorly chosen music. The only positives are the selection of locations, sometimes the camera and, above all, motifs derived from Moroccan culture and national traditions, thanks to which the film at least seems slightly original. (10.10.2019)

This is an extremely heavy-handed Moroccan clone of King's novel "It", probably influenced by the commercial success of recent American movie adaptations. They borrow almost everything from King, even the structure of the narrative which runs on two parallel planes of existence, where we watch the characters as children being threatened by a surrealist monster, and then watch them reunited after 25 years, so that they may all work together to put a stop to it. Unlike the aforementioned book, however, the characters are too shallow, the plot is chaotic, there is an absence of logic and a completely insufficient explanation of the monster’s mythology. When ugly CGI, actors who are not believable, zero horror atmosphere and the fact it has no original ideas are all added to the mix, I actually have no idea why I should be interested in this movie. This is an unsatisfactory attempt at horror in every way. [Sitges 2019] (09.10.2019)