This is the very essence of a revenge movie. I have no idea why this was labeled as a horror movie aside from the fact that the aforementioned revenge that is taken is enacted in such a gruesome way that it's possibly the horrific thing that shoved this movie into the horror category.
The story is painfully straight-forward. If you're looking for twists and turns, you've come to the wrong place. These people don't know subtlety when it comes to scripts like this, so they hit hard, and they hit whatever is directly in front of them. In this case, what they hit is a little girl.
Billi Baker plays a pretty little blonde girl, and that seems to suit her particular skillset, as she is really little, blonde, and a girl. She doesn't have to do much acting as the movie progresses. Michael Thomson is the father who is dealing (not well) with his daughter's abduction and subsequent murder. He's not a great actor, but I really like how comfortable he is in his own skin. I mean, normally an actor who knows he's going to be doing some shirtless shots in a movie goes out and lifts some weights or something, but this guy just opens up his pasty white arms and pulls the camera into his sagging gut with a, "Love me for who I am."
Also pretty low on the acting list is the guy who plays his brother, the mouth-breathing surfer dude. Christian Radford is a name I'd never heard before, and I would be shocked to hear it again. It's not even that the character - who has virtually no redeeming qualities - but the guy who is playing him. He's just not particularly talented at pretending to be human.
So, the father finds the guy who is guilty (at least he is really sure he's guilty) very quickly. This made me think that it couldn't possibly be the right guy, as the evidence hadn't been vetted and it seemed too coincidental that he found the guy so quickly, but that's the kind of movie we're in. So the father goes about torturing the guy in new and more ingenious ways than you would expect. That's about the most creative aspect of the film, really.
Direction was weak
Story was very weak
Dialog was pretty terrible
Acting was passable for Australia
Effects were pretty good
Bottom Line: Not the greatest work of art put to film.
0.75/5