The basics of the plot involve a radical form of addiction therapy that takes a person's addiction and mutate it into a living organism; which could then be removed. Making a psychological dysfunction into murderous children? This is the basic premise of David Cronenberg's The Brood. Drawing comparisons to Cronenberg is one of the best ways to set yourself up for failure, so never let it be said the producers of Hidden 3D are not ambitious in their pursuit of failure.
If you read through the credits, pick out any actor's name; congratulations, you now know the name of someone who was terrible in a movie. Sean Clement and Jordan Hayes have all the chemistry of noble gases and Alessia Agrosi is so bad that I cannot tell whether she is English or Italian, as neither accent really sounds like something a human being should be using.
There are some stylish moments including some effective time-lapse photography and moments where the camera swoops through the faintly gothic architecture - like something Tim Burton could sneeze onto the screen on a slow day. These attempts at creating a visual signature for the film are short lived and things become very flat and very standard.
The movie has some surprisingly strong cinematography, the colour palette is often icy and crisp, much like scenery surrounding the home, but it seems to stay that way throughout. Even scenes that should be dark and mysterious have this bright, chilly glow (likely a side effect of being made with 3D in mind) and for a movie intended to be seen in 3D there's very little depth evident.
Hidden 3D’s idea of horror is contained to three very basic techniques: (1) Characters pulled away into shadow. (2) non-threatening looking children standing in the background of well-lit rooms, never being noticed. (3) CGI tentacles sprouting from every child's face.The plot stumbles along at a leaden pace, by the 40 minute mark (of a 78 minute long movie, including credits) you have seen exactly two monsters and three implied fatalities which all happened within the space of 10 minutes. Even then, the story refuses to get to anything resembling a point and drags out revelations already blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention during the prologue.
Note: I saw the 2D version but, rest assured, it would take a lot more than an extra dimension to improve this movie. Unless the third dimension was made of vodka, which is probably essential to getting through this movie.
