Carnography

The Devil's Doorway (2018)

Welcome to December, the time of year when I really ramp up my efforts to see as many 2018 films as I can before the end of the year. Unfortunately, unless the Cinema Fairy visits my local multiplex(es) and sprinkles enough magic dust to make them show Suspiria and/or The House That Jack Built, those films are out of the running, but not to worry! There's still plenty of films from this year that I should have seen before now! Which is why I'm starting with a random pick - the Irish found-footage film The Devil's Doorway.

In 1960, priests Thomas Riley and John Thornton are sent by the Vatican to a Magdalene Laundry in Northern Ireland, to investigate an apparent miracle there - a statue of the Virgin Mary has allegedly been weeping blood. The older Father Riley is cynical and disbelieving of the events he is sent to investigate, while the younger Father Thornton, who is filming their investigation on a 16mm camera, is much more eager and willing to believe in the supernatural. Father Riley is also concerned with the conditions at the asylum, where "fallen women" are sent to be used as unpaid labour by the nuns who run the facility as "penance" for their perceived sins. During their stay there Father Thornton starts to experience paranormal phenomena and comes to believe more and more, while Father Riley is more concerned with what is going on in the Laundry. Things come to a head when they discover a young girl, pregnant and chained to a bed in the basement of the asylum, in a room whose walls are lined with crucifixes. What is the real reason that the two priests have been called to the Magdalene Laundry, and what is the truth of the terrible things that are happening within its walls?

The Magdalene Laundries is one of Ireland's biggest scandals (although the Laundries weren't just in Ireland - there were also Magdalene Laundries in places like England, the United States and Australia, among other places.). They were institutions for "fallen women" - theoretically prostitutes, but in practice, any girl or young woman considered promiscuous or difficult, or the mentally disturbed, could be sent to one of these places. There they would be forced to work unbearably long hours, usually doing laundry by hand, and were usually mentally and physically abused by the nuns who ran the Laundries. Many were also sexually abused by visiting priests as well, and in recent years there has been proof of mass infanticide discovered at the sites of some former Laundries. They were terrible places and to its credit, The Devil's Doorway does a good job of showing this - even if it does place at least some of the blame on distinctly non-Catholic forces by the end of the film.

And about that... We've got an old priest and a young priest, and a young girl kept chained to a bed in a room with crucifixes lining the walls (who all inevitably become Petrine crosses at one point in the film, of course); she speaks languages she shouldn't know, self-mutilates with a crucifix, causes a nun to do some extreme yoga and levitates off the bed at one point. Hmm, all this reminds me of something but I just can't quite put my finger on it... The film also starts with one character (the young priest) running around some basement ruins with his camera and calling out for the other priest before being ambushed by someone (it's a flash-forward, of course), and I was listening carefully to see if I could hear any echoing cries of "Tell us where you are, Josh!" And this, I feel, is one of the main failing points of the film - it's way too obviously derivative.

I also feel that the film should have had more courage in its convictions. From almost minute one we're shown that the Laundry is a terrible place and that the women there are being terribly mistreated by the nuns, and that the Mother Superior in her little frilled bonnet is a really evil piece of work hiding behind the shield of religion. It would certainly have then made perfect and poetic sense for the holy statue to be weeping blood in a sort of outrage of how the women were being abused. But then we veer off into occult rituals, baby sacrifices and the nuns all being secret Satanists, and I've got to say, that disappointed me. It felt like a cop-out; we know just how bad these places were both from our own knowledge and what the film has shown us, but at the very last minute the blame is shifted somewhere else.

There was also one technical aspect that confused me. Several times during the course of the film, the camera being used to film everything would "blink" - ie. go black for a second, usually while something tense and supernatural was going on; often when they/we were following said supernatural event. Now I don't know if old 16mm cameras in 1960 did that, but it felt much less like an actual technical issue and more like a device to heighten tension - especially since it didn't happen all the time. As I said, it seemed to happen whenever they were chasing a ghostly child down a corridor or some stairs (oh yeah, there are sinister ghostly children in this as well, mainly for the purpose of jump scares), possibly to hide their movements so they could appear and disappear at will (and for the jump scares). Filming the whole film on 16mm was certainly a bold move though, and impressive in itself. It's just a shame they didn't feel they could be a little bolder and more original.

 

 

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

While Ghostwatch will always hold a place in my heart as the BBC drama that inadvertently terrified me and a generation and was at least partly responsible for kindling the fascination with found footage and mockumentary horrors and the way in which certain publicity methods and media, in general, can create a special type of buzz around films almost greater than the film itself, it's not the only film out there to utilise this format. Today we're taking a look at the WNUF Halloween Special, a "film" I'd been wanting to see since it first came out but which I only got around to seeing it last night.

It's October 31, 1987, and television channel WNUF is broadcasting their special Halloween programming. Among the safety tips for trick-or-treaters, a local dentist's "Cash for Candy" scheme and a segment on a Christian group who believe that the holiday is evil and that all those who participate in it will come to an unpleasant end, the highlight of the night is a live broadcast from the Webber House, a local property that has stood empty since the brutal murders of Mr and Mrs Webber by their son 20 years previously. The son claimed that he had been driven to commit the murders by demonic spirits after using an Ouija board, and many people have claimed that the house is still haunted by those spirits. Reporter Frank Stewart plans to broadcast a live investigation into the house, with a Catholic priest and a psychic investigator couple and their "psychic" cat Shadow, and even hold a phone-in seance in the house on live TV. Almost from the moment they enter the house, however, the psychics begin to feel that there is a threatening presence in the house and that they are in danger. Frank is flippant about the whole situation though and demands the investigation and broadcast continue, even after the investigators' equipment is smashed and Shadow goes missing. Clearly, someone or something is in the Webber House with Frank and the others; will this live broadcast prove the existence of ghosts, or will this all end badly for the crew?

As I said at the start, I've wanted to see the WNUF Halloween Special since it came out in 2013; I couldn't bring myself to watch it until last night, however, because the moment I learned there was a cat going into the house I had a terrible feeling about what that would mean for poor Shadow. To say whether I was right or wrong would constitute a spoiler though, and since the WNUF Halloween Special is best experienced knowing as little as possible going in, all I'll say is that I succeeded in watching it, and I'm glad I did - even if my heart was pounding with the horrible anticipation of potential cat death for parts of it.

The whole gimmick of the WNUF Halloween Special is that it's an old VHS recording of the live broadcast from 1987, complete with static, the occasional tracking error and even ad breaks and local TV ads (which reminds me, must go down to Phil's Carpet Warehouse). This serves to both give the film a massive dose of cinema verite authenticity, and also give a massive dose of nostalgia for anyone watching who grew up in the 1980s. Granted, some of this was lost on me because UK 80s TV was pretty different from US 80s TV, but I can still appreciate the effect the film was going for. I will say that the frequency of the ads did start to grate on me after a while, and the pacing did start to suffer as a result of them as the film progressed, especially with the way the film would "fast-forward" through the ads on several occasions. It did keep with the concept that this is an old VHS tape that we're watching and that we're just skipping through some of the "boring bits", but it was really a very fine line between immersion and boring that they trod with this idea.

The WNUF Halloween Special does succeed in creating the right kind of atmosphere though. You really could believe that this was broadcast in the 1980s, on a small local channel, and that people just stumbled on it that Halloween night in 1987, not realising what they were tuning into and remaining transfixed as the events unfolded. You can see that it learned its craft from some of the greats (although your mileage may vary) of the past - The Last Broadcast, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, The Blair Witch Project and possibly even Ghostwatch itself, from framing to the potentially unreliable narrator (because hey, this could still be just one big hoax, right?)

The atmosphere in which you watch the WNUF Halloween Special is also key to how much you enjoy it, I think. I was lucky enough to watch it as part of a group, where we kept up the conceit that the events we were watching really happened, at least in part for the people (like me) who hadn't seen it before. Of course, we knew it was all fiction, but it was fun for those 82 minutes to really suspend disbelief and get properly into it. I certainly think I wouldn't have had the same enjoyable experience if I'd watched it on my own in a drier, more analytical setting, so take that as you will. But if you're like me and enjoy things like Ghostwatch and Local58, then you should definitely give the WNUF Halloween Special a watch.

 

Amazon US

Hell House LLC 2: The Abbadon Hotel (2018)

As I said in my review of the first Hell House LLC movie, I came to this series very recently after pointedly ignoring it for some time, thinking it was just another generic found footage "investigation into a scary house goes terribly wrong" movie - and how very wrong I was. Part of the reason I finally got around to watching the first movie was hearing that a sequel was coming out, so after having the pants scared off me with the first movie, I then moved on to the second - Hell House LLC 2: the Abbadon Hotel. But will the sequel managed to be as horrifying as the first one, or did it use up all its scares already?

Set in 2017, it's been eight years since the events at the Hell House set up in the Abbadon Hotel caused the deaths of 15 people, and later the disappearance of documentary filmmaker Diane Graves, and both the film and the hotel have become urban legends of a sort, with thrillseekers regularly breaking into the hotel (and never coming out again) despite a police presence and morning news shows doing segments on the phenomenon. Investigative journalist Jessica Fox decides to do an investigation into the hotel and its deadly history after receiving a transcript from an unknown source and manages to persuade Mitchell Cavanaugh, the only surviving member of the 2014 documentary team, to accompany them into the hotel. Once inside, however, they discover not only more mysterious tapes that reveal more about the dark history of the Abbadon Hotel, but also that there might have been more to the events at the Hell House than had previously been known. Unfortunately, they also find themselves trapped in the hotel as well, as the dark forces there have plans for them that go beyond just terrifying and tormenting them...

For his 1961 horror film Homicidal, director William Castle created a promotional gimmick he called the "Fright Break", wherein audience members too afraid to watch to the end of the film had a 45-second window before the film's climax to leave the cinema and receive a full refund. After having to pause the movie about two-thirds of the way through again to go into the other room to calm down and pet the cat, I'd like to propose that we bring the "Fright Break" back, if only for the sake of my blood pressure and digestive system. Yes, I was slightly dubious as to whether The Abbadon Hotel could be as seriously unnerving as the first film, but after only 15 minutes my fears were assuaged - or intensified, depending on how you look at it. I'm not ashamed to admit that the sight of just a pair of legs standing halfway up a flight of stairs and doing nothing else managed to make me watch through my fingers for the remainder of the scene, or that even though I knew that Huggy the Evil Eyeless Clown (I started calling him Huggy in an attempt to make him less scary. It didn't work) would inevitably make an appearance, I still cringed in my seat when he did. In fact, I'm happy that The Abbadon Hotel continued in this series tradition of scaring the living daylights out of me because before I discovered the Hell House LLC movies I'd almost given up hope that I'd be scared by anything but jump scares (which don't count) in horror ever again.

The plot is, again, the weakest part of the whole movie, feeling a little bit hokey with its 80s Satanic cult meeting in the hotel and performing sacrifices for their own ulterior ends, but since the plot is really just the basic structure that the film hangs its atmosphere, scares and generally very unnerving air on, that doesn't really matter too much. I did spot one potential plot hole in the claim that the entire cult all committed suicide in the hotel's dining room, when in the previous film we saw just owner Andrew Tully hanging there, but since this film did finally explain what secret Alex had been keeping from the rest of his crew from the first film and we're apparently getting another film after this, I will remain optimistic that everything will eventually be explained (and if not, it's hardly that important anyway). Some of the plot twists are, again, a little too obvious - I know I didn't trust the rather cadaverous-looking Abbadon town council spokesman from the moment I first saw him, for example - but things still flow along smoothly enough rather than jerking forward awkwardly with abrupt revelations thrown at the audience in the third act like many modern horrors.

As well as Huggy the Clown, creepy ghost girl returns for the sequel as well, and she's also joined by some of the victims of the Hell House from the previous film. We also get a nice little Vanishing Hitchhiker segment and aspects of the way the Abbadon Hotel/its spirits operated reminded me of both House of Leaves and the Dionaea House, albeit with their own spin on it. The use of multiple sources of found footage, inserted throughout the film so that it jumps back and forth from previous incidents and a TV segment that gradually tells the story of how this new group ended up in the hotel, to the events that befell this ill-fated group, both keeps with the mockumentary style and serves to keep the audience off-balance, so that we're not sure where the next scare is going to come from. There's also a TV psychic who enters the hotel with our group, and much like with Grave Encounters I couldn't wait to see him meet a sticky end in there.

Hell House LLC 2: The Abbadon Hotel is currently available exclusively on Shudder, and is indeed meant to be the middle part of a trilogy. Clearly the series is building to something big for the third and final part, and I for one am really looking forward to seeing it.

 

 

Hell House LLC (2016)

Here we are, yet again, with another film I initially ignored for a while. I'd see Hell House LLC pop up on Amazon Prime, and I'd read the synopsis, but I never thought to actually watch it because I assumed it was just another low-budget found footage movie among many, and even I was starting to get a little tired by their sameness. And then I started to notice people posting about it, and the things they were saying were generally very positive. Then a sequel got released, and I figured the universe had given me enough signs and actually sat down to watch it.

And now that a day has passed and I no longer feel quite so afraid that I'm going to wake in the middle of the night and be attacked by a creepy ghost girl sitting at the foot of my bed, I can come here and gibber manically that this is a rare case of a film being worthy of the hype.

On October 8, 2009, a haunted house attraction opened in the small town of Abbadon, New York, in the town's abandoned Abbadon Hotel. During the opening night, something went terribly wrong and 15 people, including most of the staff and several patrons, died there, although no-one could discover what exactly happened, blaming it instead on an "unknown malfunction". Several years later, a documentary team decides to make a film investigation into what happened that night and the hotel's past. While making their film, they are contacted by the sole surviving staff member of Hell House LLC, Sara Havel, who agrees to be interviewed as part of their documentary and also provides them with tapes shot by the staff in the weeks leading up to the tragedy, as they set up the attraction. We watch the crew arriving and setting things up in the Abbadon Hotel, as well as seeing them start to experience eerie and disturbing goings-on that grow in intensity the closer it gets to opening night. What happened in the Abbadon Hotel that night, and how did anyone come to survive it?

There is a very small list of films that have truly managed to unnerve and/or scare me over the years. Ghostwatch. Ringu. The Last Broadcast. Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. The Blair Witch Project (although technically there were external factors there as well). I can now add Hell House LLC to the list, because it does such an incredible job of creating tension and dread, and exploiting common fears (and I'm not even afraid of clowns!) that I had to pause the film about two-thirds of the way through and go into the other room to calm down for a bit before coming back to keep watching from behind my fingers. The atmosphere it creates really is that damn good.

Now granted, the plot is a little hackneyed. Abandoned place with a dark and sinister past, paranormal activities start happening, one person is there to "document everything" with his camera... It's Ye Olde Found Footage Checklist. There's also a bit quite early on in the "found" tapes where the crew find an old picture of a woman in the Abbadon Hotel and point out that it looks a lot like Sara, and if you know anything about horror movie plots and cliches you'll be rolling your eyes at that a little and making predictions as to how the rest of the film will turn out. Now I'm not going to say whether or not I was right in my predictions because that would spoil things, but I will say that I maybe should have given the film a little more credit. Besides, the story really takes second place to the incredibly creepy atmosphere that grows throughout the film's 83-minute runtime.

The scares/increasing creep factor are done very simply, yet effectively, through the use of things like camera framing and shadows, half-glimpsed images through strobe lighting (and later still images to clarify that what we thought we saw was actually there) and things moving about that shouldn't be moving about. And by "things" I mean a creepy clown mannequin with bleeding eye sockets that keeps moving about the hotel on its own. Coulrophobics beware - this film might not be one for you. There's also the mystery of what happened on opening night - at the start of the film we're shown footage from one of the patrons as they go through the house and start to notice some small unsettling things, but the alleged focal point of all the carnage, the basement, is never shown. Instead, for the rest of the film it gets talked about in vague yet unsettling terms, amping up the fascination and the dread that the audience feels as they imagine just what did happen. Of course, this does end up being a bit of a double-edged sword, as by the time we finally do get to see what went on in there the reality is a bit of an anti-climax as we've imagined something far different (and gorier) than what we see. At least, that's what happened with me.

There's a couple of other minor flaws to the film as well - either I missed something or we the audience are never told why Alex, the man in charge, is so hell-bent (haha) on staying in the hotel despite everything going on, even though we see the aftermath of some of the other staff being told; and there's a bit where two of the staff are running around looking for a missing friend of theirs and shouting out his name, and all my brain could do was add in Mike screaming, "Tell us where you are, Josh!" to the scene and after that it lost a lot of its gravitas. But these are very minor flaws indeed and don't really affect the finished product.

Hell House LLC, if I'd seen it in 2016, would have made my Top 5 Films of the Year. Now all I have to do is get up the courage to watch the sequel...

 

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Amityville: No Escape (2016)

I can't help but think that the title of today's movie, Amityville: No Escape, might have been better suited for the last movie in this series. After all, with the whole town being in on the evil plot in The Amityville Terror, there was very little chance of escape there. Instead, we've got... well, you'll see.

The movie claims to be a collection of footage filmed in both 2016 and 1997 in Amityville. The 2016 footage is from a graduate student and his friends who were spending time in the woods there as part of his thesis on fear. The 1997 footage is from an army wife filming their new house (which is of course meant to be the Amityville house) and her experiences there. The movie flips between these two sets of footage throughout - the army wife experiences growing levels of paranormal activity in her new home; the group in the woods experience strange noises and meet strange men with shotguns and creepy little (ghost) girls wandering the woods at night. Will any of these people survive, or will they be nothing more than more victims of the Amityville spirits?

You know how, with some films, you watch them and say to yourself, "This film really wants to be [better and more successful film]"? Well, Amityville: No Escape really wants to be two films - Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. The army wife (and I'm pretty sure we're never even told her name, so little characterisation is given to her) is the Paranormal Activity part, and the group in the woods is, obviously, the Blair Witch Project part. And until the very end of the film, it's a case of never the twain shall meet - and even then, the last shot of the film explains nothing. We might as well have been watching two separate short film for all the continuity they shared with each other (and together, the two storylines only come to 75 minutes).

At the very start of the film, some introductory text informs us that this footage has been put together to document the "inauspicious events" that took place in 1997 and 2016. It goes on to say that, for "marketing purposes" this footage, this evidence of crimes committed, has been titled Amityville: No Escape. If police departments are now having to sell evidence as feature films, then clearly budget cuts for the emergency services are far worse than we thought.

Another thing that's a little odd about Amityville: No Escape is that it's apparently set in our universe - ie. a universe where the whole Amityville story and all the movies are just that - fictional movies, which makes this movie rather meta in nature. Not that it matters all that much, because it's mentioned only once in passing in the whole movie and has no bearing on the plot. The film also makes the claim that Amityville is "the most haunted city in the USA", which is news to the dozens of websites that list haunted places in the US, where Amityville doesn't even make it into the Top 25.

It's another zero-budget entry in the series as well, shown this time by the fact that practically nothing happens on camera. There's a couple of bangs, some howling wolves and a couple of moving objects at one point, and a couple of shots of the creepy little girl (ghost) dressed in white and standing out there in the middle of the night, but that's about it. Whenever someone dies, our Blair Witch-like cast just comes across them lying dead on the ground with some fake blood sprinkled on them and/or oozing out of their mouths. They then emote rather weakly and move on. Seriously, they come across one dead guy in the woods in the middle of the night, and just wander back to their tents while making vague talk about "getting help". Army wife gets an even more ridiculous climax, as the evil spirits actually turn the camera away from her before attacking, so we just hear some screaming and then some thuds. It's the height of lazy filmmaking.

Amityville: No Escape is unimpressive and unmemorable, even in terms of this series in general. Just about the only other thing of note about it is that it shows boobs several times in the start and one shot of full-frontal female nudity, because cheap exploitation is the one thing this series had been missing up until now.

Amazon US

 

 

Phoenix Forgotten (2017)

Most of the time when a (horror) movie claims to be "based on true events", they're playing fast and loose with the phrase. In the case of Phoenix Forgotten, though, it's actually a little more accurate than average, as the basic premise/backstory is based on the actual 'Phoenix Lights' mass UFO sighting of 1997.

Sophie Bishop is making a documentary about the disappearance of her brother Josh 20 years previously in 1997. After witnessing the phenomenon of the Phoenix Lights during Sophie's 6th birthday party (and managing to catch them on film), Josh becomes convinced that what they all saw was extraterrestrial in origin, and sets out to make his own documentary investigating them. With the help of two of his friends, Ashley and Mark, Josh films the places where the sightings occurred and some of the witnesses and investigates possible explanations for the Lights, although it does not change his beliefs that they were alien in nature. Eventually, the three teens head out into the Arizona desert to where Josh thinks that the Lights will next appear... but the three of them never return and only a small amount of their footage is found, which tells investigators nothing. Sophie's own documentary is stumped at this point as well... until a previously undiscovered videotape emerges, showing what really happened to Josh and his friends the night they vanished...

Okay. I need to get something out of the way first. The term 'UFO' stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It does not automatically mean alien craft, and frankly, it really bothers me when the two terms are used as though they're interchangeable. I know I'm being pedantic and this is probably all related to my OCD and the fact that I've been fascinated with the UFO phenomenon since I was about six, but it's just one of my things. So while Phoenix Forgotten might use 'UFO' to mean 'alien craft', I'm going to be correcting it as we go.

Phoenix Forgotten, in fact, is another opportunity for me to pull out some of my old Ufology knowledge, as the idea of UFO sightings being recorded in the Bible - specifically Ezekiel 1:16 - is a real one. (I was taught during my Christian Theology A-Level that Ezekiel was probably suffering from catatonic schizophrenia, so make of that what you will.) The Ezekiel sighting is part of the evidence proponents of the 'ancient astronauts' theory cite, but as I've stated in other reviews of UFO-related horror, I didn't even believe that when I was 12, and I believed in crop circles back then. Regardless, I'm impressed that the filmmakers picked a lesser-known UFO 'event' to go along with the much more infamous Phoenix Lights incident.

Impressive research notwithstanding, however, Phoenix Forgotten takes a long time to get going. It's been compared by others to The Blair Witch Project, and I have to say I agree with at least part of that assessment - very little really happens in the film until the final 20 or so minutes of the film, when we get to see the contents of the mysterious videotape (that the USAF doesn't want people to see, we're told ominously). Nobody kicks a map into a creek (because there aren't any in the desert) but there's certainly growing tension with the three teens as they wander the desert and the occasional cave at night. Then one of them abruptly disappears, and the other two spend some time running around and calling his name before everything goes haywire in the film's climax. Really, now that I think about it if Ashley's name was changed to Heather and you just listened to the audio, you could probably be forgiven for thinking you were listening to The Blair Witch Project at times, but now Elly Kedward is apparently zipping around in a flying saucer (or alien gyroscope, if you want to get technical).

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about Phoenix Forgotten, though, is the fact that one of the producers was none other than Ridley Scott. You'd think that a film like this would have been well and truly in the low-budget category of found footage films, but it actually had a budget of nearly $3 million. Other than the final 10 minutes of the film, though, and some post-production video editing to make the 1997 footage look like it actually was shot in 1997, that doesn't really show itself in the film. Overall, the film's really a bit of a disappointment - it wastes a couple of good ideas like the appearance of the alien craft by only showing them briefly at the very end, and wastes time on trying to shoehorn in ancient astronaut theories when that particular plot point isn't even necessary to move the film forward.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

The Bay (2012)

It's the last day of my unofficial found-footage week, and we're finishing off with another standout from the subgenre. And while Barry Levinson of all people might not have been someone you might have expected to make a horror mockumentary, you do have to admit that his film, The Bay, is definitely effective.

The Bay purports to be a documentary about the events that took place in the town of Claridge, Maryland during their July 4 celebrations in 2009. Events have been pieced together with the use of various pieces of footage shot by townspeople, doctors, local authorities and news reports shot by a junior reporter, Donna Thompson, who was there covering the July 4 event. The day starts off normally - and happily - enough, with a crap-eating contest and a dunk tank among the festivities, but the mood quickly changes as people start to suffer from painful rashes of boils and lesions springing up on their bodies. These rashes quickly spread and, as more and more people start to become ill, doctors discover that people are literally being eaten from the inside out by some sort of parasite. It becomes a race against time to try to find a cure before it's too late, as well as try to get the truth about what caused all of this out...

So, those isopods that are the (utterly horrifying) monsters of this film. They're real. More commonly known as the tongue-eating-louse, they've occasionally turned up in cans of tuna or ready-made supermarket fish dinners - and I admit to some small amount of glee when telling people about these news stories and then showing them footage from this movie. One has to get their pleasures where they can. In reality though, sea live do not grow to the sizes they do in The Bay, nor do they prey on humans... yet.

The Bay was made after director Barry Levinson was approached to make a documentary on the environmental problems in the Chesapeake Bay. He studied the bay's problems and watched another documentary on the topic, and realised that, as important as the subject was, people just weren't going to to watch yet another straight-up documentary on eco-disasters and pollution as it would be boring. So he decided to make it a horror film instead, making The Bay a speculative "what if?" mockumentary that took the existing facts of the pollution problems and environmental issues facing the Chesapeake Bay and tweaked them just enough to make it a freaky, attention-grabbing body- and eco-horror movie.

The Bay is therefore just the right side of plausible (Levinson once noted that the film was "80% factual information."). The idea that water is the medium that the killer mutant sea lice are transmitted really hooks the audience because, hey, we all drink, wash, use or otherwise come into contact with water at some point every day (I myself always have a bottle of water on hand, for example... which only made writing this review while feeling unwell all the more worrying). Suddenly, drinking water, or washing your car, or running through a sprinkler takes on a whole new level of terror because it might make you break out in horrific, agonising boils and by eaten from the inside out. And of course we all know about all the pollutants and other crap that gets flushed into the water table all the time.

Because The Bay is set up to be a professional documentary (put out by not-Wikileaks) it gets to have bigger production values than your average found-footage/mockumentary film. This includes things such as a narrative voice-over and captions to explain other events, as well as having several different sources for the footage that makes up the film. There's the footage shot by the reporter and her cameraman, mobile phone and camcorder footage shot by townspeople - first as they're just celebrating the day, and then later as a kind of dying record of what has happened to them - police dashcam footage and recordings of Skype calls between the hospital and the CDC as they attempt to work out what has infected the town and how to cure it. It's an effective way of telling several stories in one film, all woven together into one overreaching narrative.

If there's a problem with The Bay, is with the plot contrivances. The mutant killer sea lice have clearly been lurking in the bay for several weeks now, so what are the odds that absolutely no-one showed any symptoms or became infected until July 4, when all at once most of the town comes down with a bad case of carnivorous internal parasites at the same time, and the whole life cycle of the infection takes only a few hours? Still, it's a plot contrivance with a point, as a long drawn-out infection would kill most of the tension and horror of the situation. The inclusion of the young couple and their baby visiting the town was also clearly only dropped in to give us an emotional hook to raise the stakes some more - oh no, will the baby be eaten by sea lice? Will we care about it any more than we care about any of the other 6,200 townspeople having sea lice chew their way out of their bodies? It's a bit of cheap emotional manipulation. But I'll forgive it because the rest of the film is so gripping and memorable.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Found Footage 3D (2016)

I originally had a different film planned for today, but when I saw that this was available on Shudder I knew I had to change my plans. After all, in what has turned out to be a week of looking at various found-footage films, it would be remiss of me not to cover the first 3D one, so here we go with Found Footage 3D.

(Just to note; yes, I watched the 2D version of this film. Partly because that's the only version currently available on Shudder, but also because of my inability to perceive the 3D in 3D films without severe migraines. So if you want to know if the 3D is any good, you'll have to wait for the 3D version to be released and see it yourself. Sorry.)

Filmmaker Derek is about to start production on his first film, Spectre of Death, a found-footage horror movie. He's written (most) of the script himself and is playing the lead role - Derek, a workaholic filmmaker on a vacation with his wife; he's hired a director and a sound man; he's "hired" a girl he met at a party to be the PA; and his brother Mark is filming the behind-the-scenes documentary. Oh, and his ex-wife Amy is acting alongside him as his character's long-suffering wife and their marriage is at the make-or-break point. Derek has also had an idea to make his film stand out from all the other found-footage movies that get released every year - his is going to be in 3D! Filming starts and tensions are soon running high on-set, between the love-hate relationship between Derek and Amy, Mark's obvious feelings for Amy, Derek's flirting with the PA and his constant micromanaging of the direction... Oh, and there's also the issue of the isolated cabin they're filming at being actually haunted by an angry spirit. Film and reality start to blur together as the spirit insists on having a role in the film as well, whether the cast and crew like it or not...

Going for a meta-narrative, especially so blatantly in a film, is always going to be a bit of a risky move. If all goes well, you've got your Blazing Saddles or your Peeping Tom. If it doesn't go well, you're getting something like Scream 3 instead. Thankfully, Found Footage 3D manages to pull things off successfully - an impressive feat when you consider that even the meta-narrative of "film crew finds that what they're faking is in fact real" is a common narrative in found-footage films in general.

Another thing that makes the film work is the amount of dark, tongue-in-cheek humour it has, as you would probably expect from a film that seems to be not-so-subtly poking fun at the found-footage and 3D fads. Mainly it comes in sly little digs at some of the most common plot devices or tropes of the found-footage subgenre, including Derek's complaints about not wanting shaky cam in his film and why everyone has to die at the end of a found-footage movie (because everyone usually does die). There's also the absurdity of shooting a found-footage film in 3D to begin with (I know I laughed when I first heard about it). There's also one wonderfully sneaky dig at a certain film that had a certain map that got kicked into a certain creek, and the Scott Weinberg cameo lends another level of dark, knowing humour to it all.

I will admit, when I first heard of Found Footage 3D I didn't think it was going to be a good film. I figured it was just going to try coasting on its 3D gimmick, but it surprised me by actually being entertaining. The filmmakers certainly know their genre, which helps, and it's well-made and doesn't look cheap. There's also little-to-no night vision, hurrah! I obviously can't speak as to how good the 3D effects are, but the 2D versions of them were perfectly fine - simple, yet effective.

There are a couple of scenes where the acting seems a bit forced, but really the only major problem I found I had with Found Footage 3D is that Amy didn't really feel like a fully-developed character; instead, she felt more like a plot device to create tension and move parts of the film forward, and for Derek and Mark to fight over. Derek treats her like crap, while Mark alternates between obviously pining for her and practically White Knighting her. It just didn't feel to me like she had much individual importance beyond that. But apart from that, Found Footage 3D was a surprisingly good - and fun - little film, and is worth checking out.

 

 

Grave Encounters (2011)

In my review of Noroi: The Curse yesterday, I mentioned that a lot of found-footage movies in recent years follow the same basic formula - a team of paranormal investigators head in to a haunted hospital or prison or mental asylum or shopping centre to film an episode of their paranormal TV show, and soon find themselves in way over their heads. So today I figured I would look at one of the better entries in that sub-subgenre, Grave Encounters.

We start with an executive producer giving us a brief history of the ghost investigation TV show, Grave Encounters, which was abruptly cancelled after the cast and crew all disappeared while filming the sixth episode. Their footage was eventually recovered, however, and edited together for us to watch now. So we see the investigation team, including host Lance Preston, "occult expert" Sasha Parker and "medium" Houston Grey, investigating an abandoned mental asylum that has a history of sadistic doctors, unnecessary surgery and now paranormal activity. Everything starts out much as you would expect from this kind of show, with a lot of nothing much except for a few ambiguous events, but when the ghosts start to get a little too physical they decide they're done with the investigation and pack up to leave. The asylum isn't done with them, however, and Lance and his team find themselves unable to leave - time seems to trap them in an eternal night and all the asylum's exits become sealed up or loop back on themselves, making escape impossible. After that, the asylum ghosts really start having fun with the helpless living people...

I have a theory about the apparent popularity of this sub-subgenre of horror (ie. the "paranormal investigation show gone bad" story archetype) and it centres around the concepts of hubris and schadenfreude. The hubris part is more or less drawn from one or two of the Jungian Seven Basic Stories (either Rags to Riches or Voyage and Return), but different in that our protagonists go into the situation with a surfait of cockiness, and then the plot elements waste no time in bringing them down a peg or five. And of course hubris is connected to schadenfreude, because it is always satisfying to see cocky people being brought low. Particularly fake mediums. I mean, I'm sure that the actor who played Houston Grey is a very nice person in real life (and he's had a very successful career since), but I could watch Houston Grey the character being bounced off the walls by angry ghosts all day.

I think one of the other aspects that makes Grave Encounters a success is that it doesn't rely on just the usual bag of found-footage tricks. Yes, there's jump scares and sudden noises and night vision everywhere (and that's an especially egregious sin for this movie; I think well over half of it is green), but it also does things with labyrinths and impossible space and the warping of time and space itself - things I've only really seen before in things like The Blair Witch Project and the ergodic literature novel House of Leaves. The dread that comes from being in a place that seems to be alive and actively preventing you from leaving; somewhere that dangles a possible escape in front of you and then drops you in an endless loop instead is, I think , far worse than the fear caused by your regular jump scares and similar tricks.

Grave Encounters is also one of the first films (I think; going by my own recollections here and sometimes films blur together a little) to utilise the CGI "ghostface" look - not connected to Scream's Ghostface - for its ghosts. You know the look I'm talking about - black pits for eyes and a too-large mouth with an elongated jaw, usually used to roar at the protagonists/camera. It's an effective look because it falls on just the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley and thus gives viewers the creeps, but I also think that, now in 2017, it's become a little overused. Some other old tricks include someone being perched halfway up a corner of a wall like a spider monkey and the ever-popular dramatic irony of the audience seeing things moving around that the characters do not.

In the end, Grave Encounters is definitely one of the better found-footage horror movies out there. It's not perfect by any means (too much night vision; a slight over-reliance on jump scares at points...), but it's still good. It also isn't afraid to try new stuff out to creep out and/or keep its audience's interest, and fresh ideas are probably needed in the found-footage subgenre more than in others.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Noroi: The Curse (2005)

You'll have to forgive me today if this review goes into strange places; I'm writing it after seeing Blade Runner 2049 at the cinema - a beautiful 2 hour 37 minute movie that nethertheless left my brain slightly fried from all the sumptuous cinematography and set design and all the sudden loud noises that kept happening on top of that. If I'd planned things better I'd have considered whether reviewing Noroi: The Curse straight after seeing a film like that was actually a wise idea, as that film isn't exactly easy to follow either. Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Masafumi Kobayashi is a paranormal expert and investigator who has made a number of documentaries on his investigations into the paranormal. The Curse is presented to us as his final documentary, as he disappeared during the making of it after his house burned down and his wife we found dead in the ruins. The unfinished documentary gradually shows us what happened... Kobayashi began by investigating strange noises coming from a house; shortly thereafter he learns that the woman who lived there, Junko Ishii, and her son had suddenly moved out and the people who had reported the noises had died suddenly. Next he investigates a young psychic girl, Kana Yano, who demonstrated her abilities on a television show and then disappeared shortly after. Then he interviews another psychic, Hori, who wears and decorates his house with tinfoil to protect himself from "ectoplasmic worms". Meanwhile an actress appearing in a paranormal show, Marika Matsumoto, becomes connected to a malevolent spirit and starts creating looped nooses, and this is where everything starts to become connected as similar nooses were seen at Junko Ishii's house and both Kana and Hori drew similar loops as part of their psychic tests. As Kobayashi investigates deeper, he discovers connections with a demon called Kagatuba, who used to have an annual ritual performed to appease him, but not since 1978 when the village that performed the ritual was relocated to build a dam. As more and more people start dying or disappearing, Kobayashi must discover the truth about Kagatuba's ritual and find a way to appease him before it's too late...

The director of Noroi: The Curse (sometimes it's just known as The Curse but I feel better using the full title) is Kôji Shiraishi, and we've reviewed another of his films on this blog before - Sadako vs Kayako. So that's a tonal shift right there to start with. While Sadako vs Kayako was very much a tongue-in-cheek film, Noroi is a dead serious one. It was also made much earlier in Shiraishi's career - his second film, in fact - and was made during a time when he seemed to have a keen focus on both found footage/mockumentary films and in Asian urban legends. I have to say, after watching Noroi I have a real interest in seeing some of the director's other works - even (or especially) the one that got banned in the UK, Grotesque.

One reason Noroi: The Curse is better than a lot of supernatural found-footage movies is that it's played completely straight. With so many other films of this nature, the action is centred around a "ghost hunting" team of some sort, usually comprised of the type of people you'd only watch on television for the humour value or to see get massacred by an angry spirit (which, to be fair, is how most of these films turn out). The characters in Noroi, however, have none of that annoying bombast or cockiness. Even the theoretically most annoying character, Hori, doesn't fall into the trap of being reduced to a comedy character - we might pity him because we're relatively sure he's mentally ill for a lot of the film, psychic or not, but he's not presented as someone to laugh at. The investigation is also drawn out over days, even weeks, rather than being crammed into one frantic night, and it really lets the dread creep up as the film progresses and we learn more about what is really going on. The way that several seemingly random, unrelated incidents and people - Junko Ishii, Kana and Marika, for example - are slowly revealed to be more and more connected is also quite enthralling.

Noroi: The Curse didn't scare me; not in the way that films in the past like Ghostwatch and The Last Broadcast did - but then again I've seen a lot since then and learned a lot more about this genre that probably makes me wise to some of its tricks. But it did stay with me after I finished watching it, and while I was watching it I did feel an ever-growing sense of dread as things progressed and the situation became more and more dire. It tells a good story, despite it maybe seeming overly long and complicated to some, and it maintains a creepy atmosphere without resorting to a lot of the usual CGI "ghost" effects that are prominent in other films of this nature.

Amazon UK

Amazon US (not currently available)