Alice (Brittany Murphy), an artist recovering from a psychological breakdown, retreats to a remote Victorian house to convalesce and focus on finishing her screenplay in time for a fast approaching deadline. When she begins hearing strange sounds and seeing apparitions, Alice searches for the source, only to find disturbing videotapes in the attic. Fascinated by her discovery, Alice digs deeper to uncover the mysterious story of the couple (Thora Birch and Marc Blucas) on the tapes, sending her on a twisting and terrifying pursuit to find out what is behind the endless mind games.

That saying don’t judge a book by its cover because you won’t get to know the story inside also works for movies. Don’t judge Deadline by the cover because what you get is not what you would think by looking at it. By the looks of the cover Deadline looks like it would be a horror film or quite possibly a thriller. It’s neither of these. Sure it tries to be both, I think, but in the end all it ended up being was long, drawn out, and boring.

Brittany Murphy plays Alice who for some reason is having problems that has made her depressed and requiring medication. What exactly causes the depression and need for medication? Well, if you want to know the answers to that it will take nearly half the movie before it is given. Why this is I don’t know when it could have been easily given at the very beginning and then it would have actually made sense.

Actually, nothing really made sense about this movie other than why Alice was in the house. How someone can be sitting in a house alone can hear voices and then see a set of wet footprints leading to the attic not think anything is beyond my grasp. I’m not saying that I would have went running out the front door screaming like a 10 year old girl but if I’m in a house in the middle of nowhere alone and wet footprints appear out of nowhere, I’m not going to be following them. Add in that there are now things appearing on the computer screen and doors are opening on their own, equals me deciding that I can finish my work in the library where there are people around. This however, is about as creepy as the movie gets and it only happens a few times.

Deadline is a drawn out movie that has very little dialogue in it. Because there is such little dialogue the film seems a lot longer than what it is. If there had been more moments that are scary, creepy, or just has something going on in it then the little dialogue would work. But the dialogue is not what makes Deadline a boring movie, what does is there being no coherent story for the movie. Is it a horror film or is it a suspense or thriller? I’m not really sure. For an hour and twenty minutes I thought it was supposed to be a thriller or horror film but then by the end of it my thoughts had changed.

One thing about there being the little dialogue is that Brittany Murphy had to do some major acting with her body, facial features, and her movements. She had to sell her character by showing the fear and confusion without really saying anything. Though most of the acting was just mediocre it was decent enough. Thora Birch has her moments as the character Lucy who is having problems with her husband who is very paranoid.

This will not be an award winning film nor one that will be thought about being given an award but it has it’s moments, not many, but enough that the movie is not a complete loss. As boring as Deadline is for the most part it was still able to draw my attention enough where I was caught up in the story. But the saving grace for Deadline is the ending and I don’t mean in my normal sense where I’m just happy that it’s over. Nope, I actually liked how Deadline ties up everything in the end and the way it did it. It’s just the getting to that point that took too long with not enough action while having no suspense or being creepy or scary that I didn’t like. But the mose disappointing thing was the lack of special features. For being a Blu Ray Disc I was expecting to have all kinds of special features that the regular DVD wouldn't have but instead all I was treated to was a 10 minute behind the scenes feature and a few previews.