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MEGAN IS MISSING (MIM) is a movie that had a profound effect on me, and that made me sad for a good three weeks or so. At first it's just an over-the-top, sickening and relentlessly ugly depiction of teenage life. Early in the film, the girls go to this disgusting teen sex party. Amy, Megan's friend, has a horrible time, a sleazy older bum comes onto her and when she resists, he punches her in the face, she runs to find Megan and can't, the mean girls clique starts screaming in her face gangster-style, and when she finds Megan she is high as a kite and blowing some thug who is dragging her around by the hair. If you detach and don't invest in the characters, you can watch this kind of thing with no problem. But if you tend to get into the characters and invest in them, this is unbearable. It's a weird movie because it comes off as being very sleazy and exploitative. The party I mentioned, and a scene where Megan details her sexual experiences to Amy come off as being very trashy. The thing is, the real problems haven't even begun yet at that point, because Megan hasn't gone to meet her Internet boy Josh. I couldn't enjoy this movie because it was too real, and too sad. And for a while, I thought the filmmakers were inept, but once the storyline picks up I realized that they were actually pretty on top of their game, and hit me with some real shocks and a very dramatic reveal that really punched me (and everybody else, according to the IMDB comments) right in the face. But it's not over yet. We still have to see what happens to Amy, and we do. Everyone on this board has seen this stuff a hundred times if not a thousand, but this is different. We've all seen our abduction-oriented porn, or our rape-oriented porn, or even our unhappy-ending oriented porn. This is different, because this is like watching it for real. And it is deeply affecting and sad. I was so moved that I gave it a 10/10, because it's not easy to beat the hell out of me and make me care about characters, and set up a situation and do a dramatic reveal in the way I might have done it and have never seen it done. And it's not easy, after having seen virtually every horror film ever made, to actually horrify me. I am neither recommending for or against. but if you my fellow gimpers do see it, I hope you'll come here and comment.
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