I try to give these types of ultra-indie horror flicks the benefit-of-the-doubt whenever I can. I'm not an unreasonable man - I've just seen enough of this kind of thing to have noticed reoccurring shortcomings expected in certain 'modern' backyard films.
Frankly, the premise of "Mantua" is a complete mess. It has something to do with a small town cult, a 'Child of a Thousand Eyes', leaf zombies, and a giant spider...
The glaring problem I was faced with whilst watching "Mantua" was that a new character is introduced every five minutes, while other characters are either ignored for a long period of time or discarded all together. This makes for a deeply confusing sequence of seemingly random scenes in a run-time that dragged. There's a little bit of humor thrown in - the drug dealer character was kinda entertaining, but he's another person that just gets thrust out of the picture awkwardly, then we move onto more people. I couldn't keep up.
I'll give a bit of credit to the actors - most of whom did a considerably good job and, again, for a few brief moments that made me silently chuckle, but overall, "Mantua" could've used MUCH more structure and should've narrowed the plot down to a more coherent idea.
I try to give these types of ultra-indie horror flicks the benefit-of-the-doubt whenever I can. I'm not an unreasonable man - I've just seen enough of this kind of thing to have noticed reoccurring shortcomings expected in certain 'modern' backyard films.
