Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

spiff-12 I hate to say it but John Schneider doesn't do a villain very well. The acting was personable enough that you cared when most of the characters, that you got to know, died. The plot is: John Schneider is essentially a wizard in a small town in the woods of Pennsylvania in 1859. A practitioner of the black arts but has the appearance of not really a bad guy despite this, he decides that the Mayor needs to go and magically inflicts him with a plague. Unfortunately, the plague spreads at an alarming rate and, once the Wizard's daughter is infected, he creates an even worse spell that takes away the plague but summons a monster (The Ogre) That requires a sacrifice every year or it will destroy the whole town. The spell keeps the townies from having kids or aging. Fast forward to present day when one of four young adults gets a map to a mysterious town. He grabs his pals to go camping and to find the lost town of Ellensford...and hilarity ensues (Well...not so much). What I love about this movie is that it relates a message that is conveyed through feeling it. It illustrates the point in the storytelling. True to good story telling, they don't say it...they illustrate it. There are few horror movies that can do this well and this makes the movie superior to the simple hack and slash genre. Another example of this (superior) would be 'The Fly' (1958). They could have made a better movie if they stepped in with both feet. This one required a little bit extra (and a few less voice acting Extras). My usual complaint with the technical. IE. People firing a muzzle loading musket and faking massive recoil...while one of the protagonists can fire a 12 Gauge shotgun one handed and there is none. No money in the budget for a phone call to the Bass Pro shop?The grand message is: 'Living in fear is no life at all'.The movie wasn't all that it could have been but it kept me engaged when I'm often very easily bored of TV. It's a refreshing change to have a movie stir up some emotions while getting a larger point across. Not bad.

GL84 Hiking through the Pennsylvania wilderness, a group of friends find a find a mythical town gripped in fear of a terrible ogre demanding a sacrifice in exchange for eternal youth and must find a way of stopping it before they succumb the creature's wrath.This here was quite a decent enough creature feature. One of the better feature here is the admittedly fun story throughout, which starts not only with the story of the plague that's at the root of the villagers' trouble here with some great bit of folklore in this to go along with the witchcraft featured here. Not only does the rules of their pact make up a large part of this, as the covenant of featuring the sacrifice in exchange for never aging being quite enjoyable but the ties to the mythical creature and the spells necessary to ward it off at the end bring a lot of fun into play here and gives this a really nice foundation to work with. This makes for some good times here when they get to the village and encounter the townspeople where it gets spelled out in several rather fun action scenes here with the sacrificial offering that gets interrupted when they free him, the resulting chase into the woods and finally battling the creature there which gives this some really enjoyable moments as it ties into the legend and mythology started here. The finale, which brings about the utter fun rampage through the village using the spells and witchcraft as protection, is the film's highlight where some of the protection spells work and some don't which is all capped off by the trap to finally ensnare the beast developing into a great gunfight in the woods followed by witchcraft to finish it off with some nice action as well. Along with the fine gore in the high body-count from the series of encounters out in the woods which gets some more action and suspense here, these give this a lot to like to overcome the few flaws here. The main issue here is the usual amount of problems here from the below- par CGI featured here, as the main creature looks atrocious and features all the usual criticisms associated here with it being too disproportionate for surroundings from time-to-time, the inability to look realistically and all the visual elements featured here. The other flaw here is that it has a tendency to employ one of the most hated traits in a film where the one character who knows what's going on never explaining anything to the outsiders when performing rituals or actions of great importance that are going to save someone, so when they do something logical in a situation, you get a feeling he'll kill them right then and there for messing up the situation when it all could've been done away with had he simply shared his knowledge so they know what's going on and what's happening as they have no experience in the subject matter. These here are the film's real flaws that hold this one down.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Language.

joopaul I didn't expect a lot from a lowish budget B movie but I admit I quite enjoyed this film for being eerily atmospheric and for the impressive acting by the main characters. The ogre's menacing growl from deep in the forest felt quite unnerving.John Schneider slotted very neatly into his powerful convincing character. Clearly a versatile actor!I would have given this film a 7 if it wasn't for ( and I think most people would agree with me here ) a very ify ogre that seemed to be dropped in from a below average video game. When you think of the possible great GGI available in 2008 the ogre certainly could have been vastly improved ( budget allowing ). Yep, a well presented, very well acted, partly 19th Century set sci-fi fantasy film let down by the 19th century CGI.

TheLittleSongbird Ogre was not a good, let alone great, movie, but considering the uninspiring title that I was expecting schlock, I was pleasantly surprised. It does have a lot of flaws, starting with the terrible effects, sadly the Ogre is no exception. There is still the lame gore and cheesy dialogue, while the story is thin, predictable and at times tedious. On the other hand, it is one of the more tolerable movies I've seen on the SyFy channel, because while not mind-blowing the acting does look as though they are putting effort into their roles, John Schneider in particular is interesting to watch. Katherine Isaballe does at times overdo it with the shrillness though. The characters are not characters you remember for years, but they are not as irritating as other characters from the likes of the SyFy disaster movies for instance, and they are not as blatantly stereotypical either. Although the effects do cheapen the film, Ogre didn't look too bad to me, the editing was at least not slip-shod and there was attempts at an atmosphere. Again, the music is nothing extraordinary, but it has some haunting themes and it doesn't feel as though it is slowing the film down. All in all, not bad, not good, just scraping the average line. 5/10 Bethany Cox