Acolytes

Teens Who Won't Bore You To Death
Acolytes is a 2008 Australian film with a premise both simple and unusual: Three teenage friends stumble across a burial spot in the woods, identify a serial killer, and decide to blackmail him into committing a crime on their behalf. This is not a plan born out of restless boredom. The crime, it seems, is a form of rude justice for an act of violence that occurred several years earlier.

Present day scenes feature the friends' daily wanderings across a hideously boring suburban neighborhood. We never see concerned adults--other than law enforcement officers--taking an interest in anything they do. Loving parents will find this appalling, but honest ones will admit that a lot of teens live this way. Unsupervised and disconnected from parents who are busy working or just not that interested, the young people in this story create meaning and relationships from scratch. What they come up with is sometimes touching and sad, but it is also dangerous and potentially...

i was more impressed with this then the other reviewers.
i gave this a five star rating but maybe it was a four and a half.
i felt that this was a very real movie. i could see much, if not all, of this having taken place. okay, for the ease of making a movie some things were simplified [like the ease of the illegal entry into a domicile. i at no point felt that this promoted nor accepted child molestation like one of the other reviewers. i will need to watch this once more to make sure that all of the lose ends were tied up. I'm very confident that there are no slip ups. there are a number of unexpected twists that made sense because of human nature's willingness to leave important details. so when a character doesn't tell others everything it's to keep up his, or her, own public perception. nobody likes to have their past embarassements waved around.

basic story: some kids received terrible torment from a guy when they were young.
now days a girl goes missing. we don't know exactly what happened but we see...

Brilliant thriller, but sub-par with horror elements
Acolytes has a pretty simple but intriguing premise--three teens attempt a game they're not prepared to play. The game is blackmail, and the target is a cold-blooded killer. They quickly learn they're in way over their heads.

Mark is a teenager who spots a mysterious man burying something out in the woods. Probably just a dead pet, but he and his friends contemplate other possibilities--a stash of money, perhaps? They decide to go dig it up, and are flabbergasted by whay they uncover--a dead woman. When they try to report the crime over the phone, the police demand some identification. Scared, they hang up the phone instead and consider other options.

Amazing what teenagers will do when they're bored. First, they decide to track the killer down. Not trying to be heroes or anything, they do this simply out of some sick curiousity or morbid fascination. Since they know the vehicle he drives and the vicinity of where he lives, it doesn't take long...

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