I thought I had previously heard of 90's cult supernatural horror Mirror Mirror but I think I must have mixed it up with a different mirror based horror film. Either way, it is always a delight to travel back to the past and watch horrors that would have been around during my childhood, with this Marina Sargenti effort (in her directorial debut) being released when I was around eight years old. Full of cheese, with the occasional fun death scene thrown in, I liked this, but it did really drag, especially towards the second half.
Goth girl Megan (Rainbow Harvest) has recently moved into a large house with her mother, having arrived at a new town. The house clearers had intended to remove all the previous occupants furniture, but inexplicably, a strange mirror that had been removed was back in the house. Megan convinces her mother to let her keep the mirror, finding a strange pull to it. At the local school Megan's strange dress style leads to the popular kids picking on her, which in turn causes kind Nikki (Kristin Dattilo) to befriend the outsider. Megan soon confides in her new friend that the strange mirror she owns seems to have some type of power, able to grant the girl's wishes, even if at a terrible cost. Nikki at first dismisses her claims, but after a series of tragic events happen at the school to people who Megan had issues with, Nikki comes to believe the mirror has some type of terrible hold over the girl.
From the prologue that seemed to be set in the fifties or sixties it is apparent straight away that the mirror has supernatural properties to it. Backstory provided by the house clearer who discovers a journal, reveals that it is likely a demon resides within it. This demon mirror granting Megan's wishes makes up most of the film's runtime, with there being a slight suggestion that she is vaguely possessed by it. As the body count ramps up, Megan's confidence increases. The mirror doesn't just kill, it also can also cause hallucinations and pain to people. Early on this is shown when an animal mortician's flirting with Megan's mother is stopped when he starts to see flies and maggots everywhere. There wasn't really a good idea of what the mirror could do as it seemed pretty random, from controlling peoples actions, to being able to Final Destination style murder people, such as a character taking a shower when the pipes burst and burn her to death with boiling hot steam. With no apparent weaknesses, the mirror seemed unstoppable, leading up to a dream like surreal ending that left itself pretty open.
This horror was very cheesy with plenty of dodgy acting and a low-fi straight to video sounding soundtrack. The general flow was perfectly fine, but I found myself bored with a lot of the middle part of the movie circling the water and not really doing much to advance the story. The main actors were fine, but no one stood out, and peoples reactions to people around them dying were a bit too understated. The mirror was ok, I liked the views from its perspective, but it didn't look creepy, and it was ill explained. Some of the special effects were decent enough, there was blood at times, best of which had a character whose arm started getting chewed up in a food disposal unit!
Mirror Mirror was perfectly fine, but I found it to be a bit slow, and also a bit light on plot. I appreciated the cheesy early nineties vibe to it, always a joy to see, but at a hundred minutes long this felt like it could have benefitted by being more lean. Mirror Mirror is now streaming on ARROW.
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