Scar (2007)★★★☆☆

I’ve been letting Netflix make many of my movie-watching decisions for me lately, so I decided to give Amazon Prime Instant Video a chance to recommend something good. I’ll admit my expectations were pretty low, as the last time I watched something Amazon recommended to me I couldn’t make it all the way through.

But this one had Angela Bettis in it, so I figured it couldn’t be all bad. And it wasn’t! It had a lot going for it, and it was decently entertaining.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Christopher Titus as Jeff, brother of Joan (played by Bettis). In fact, I liked pretty much everyone in the cast except for Bishop. I just didn’t buy his smooth talking when he’s first hitting on the girls, and I was struggling to find him believable as a serial killer even while he was killing people in the film. And while Angela Bettis was great as present-day Joan, it took about half the movie before I could believe that she and the teenager in the flashback scenes were the same person.

The plot was pretty predictable. If you’ve seen a good number of scary movies, you’ll probably figure out who the killer is pretty quickly, and there’s no dramatic twist for the reveal. Also, the pacing was really slow at times. The flashback scenes were some of the most interesting scenes in the film, but they were fewer and further between than I would’ve liked. I think they were going for character development, but since they mostly stayed with Joan, whose character was pretty well developed early on, this doesn’t quite land right.

Overall, I was happy with the recommendation and will probably be less hesitant to watch an Amazon-recommended film than I had been before.