DreadBox: It's Not Easy Being Green

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Year: 2012

Director: Barry Levinson

Cast: Kether Donohue, Stephen Kunken, Kristen Connolly

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The found footage genre gets a lot of flak. Some people get motion sickness due to the handheld camera work. Some people like their cinema to be crafted with at least some measure of elegance. But it's mostly because the found footage genre is an easy out. Any crappy director can grab a GoPro and shoot a found footage movie in a week for about ten dollars.

This is unfortunate, because found footage is one of my favorite genres. Cinéma vérité is an interesting way of putting the audience in the driver's seat and (to paraphrase my blogging idol Tim Brayton's views on film musicals), since it seems like we're stuck with movies as an entertainment medium, we might as well do something cool with it.

The found footage genre does have a lot of turds, but if you sift through the refuse, you can find some true gems. For every The Devil Inside, there's a Paranormal Activity. For every Zombie Diaries, there's a [REC]. For every V/H/S, there's a V/H/S 2. And it'd just be too obvious to mention The Blair Witch Project here, wouldn't it?

However, the modern found footage boom ignited by 2008's Cloverfield has left the genre in a base and dirty place with increasingly diminishing returns. That problem is solved here quite admirably in The Bay which, along with being one of the first ecological horror films in history (only three other films are   credited as such - two forgotten and slapdash works from 2006 and 1978 and M. Night Shyamalan's oxymoronically titled The Happening), breathes fresh life into the genre.

In spite of its protagonist, who sounds like she stepped out of a "Californians" SNL sketch.

Purportedly collected from hundreds of various digital video devices (camcorders, webcams, cell phones, security  cameras, etc.) that were confiscated by the government following The Incident, The Bay solves the twin problems of found footage simultaneously by providing a credible source for the footage (Why does Hud keep the camera rolling when the Cloverfield monster is on his tail?) and allowing itself a way to use multiple perspectives and angles, and even throw in a little spooky music when they feel like it without taking away from the realism of the film.

These avenues have been explored in the likes of Paranormal Activity 2 and George Romero's Diary of the Dead, but they are synthesized much better here. This is perhaps due to the film's totally weird pedigree. Director Barry Levinson is no stranger to cinematic success, due to having won a freaking Academy Award for directing Rain Man.

I know. I double checked that four times to make sure I wasn't lying to y'all. How this guy ended up directing a found footage horror picture is beyond me, but I sure am glad it happened, because this is without a doubt the best found footage picture of 2012, a year that saw 13 of the flipping things.

The film depicts the events of July 4, 2009 in the Chesapeke town of Claridge, Maryland. The bay is a vital source for the population, providing income, leisure, and thanks to the new desalination plant, drinking water. Unfortunately those crystal clear blue waters harbor a dark secret (Be proud of that pun, please. I'm a sad blogger. Punning is all I have.).

The local chicken farm has been pumping steroids into their water supply and wouldn't you know it, but their feces landfill is awfully close to a runoff point. Compound that with a slight nuclear leak from a couple years back and blammo! You got yourself a dead fish stew, spiced to perfection with rapidly growing flesh eating parasites.

That are actually kind of adorable.

That fateful Fourth of July, the celebrating townspeople prematurely end their lively splashing and bayside activities to flock to the local hospital in record numbers, complaining of bizarre rashes and lesions.

And being outrageously sexy.

To add insult to injury, not only are the poor victims being eaten by the water-dwelling isopods, they are also being devoured from the inside by massive insects who snuck into the drinking water through the desalination plant as microscopic larva.

D'oh!

For most of its runtime, The Bay eschews the modern trend of throwing monsters at the camera to make you shriek (although a couple of the bugs gave Sergio and I the willies big time by bursting out of places they patently weren't supposed to be) and opts for some deep seated body horror. A fabulous choice, if I do say so myself, because nothing scares Brennan more than even remotely plausible disease pictures.

Aside from being actually pretty terrifying, The Bay boasts a magnificently large cast that dilutes the more irritating quirks of some of the characters. Featured protagonists include Donna (Kether Donohue, who has a small part in the opening of Pitch Perfect), a college reporter caught in the middle of the outbreak and Our Humble Narrator; Dr. Abrams (Stephen Kunken), the medical professional whose efforts to alert the CDC are in vain (the CDC is portrayed as a vastly incompetent body, at one point Googling a type of isopod - Commentary!); and Stephanie (Kristen Connolly, the Final Girl from The Cabin in the Woods) and Alex (Will Rogers), a young married couple who are traveling to Claridge via boat with their baby in tow.

There's also a pair of police officers, a young girl on Facetime, and the town's mayor, as well as various townspeople who make brief appearances to flesh out the widespread impact of the infection.

Your backne is out of control, girl.

Although there are some brief moments where it doesn't seem like the filmmakers quite understand how modern technology works like a laughably illiterate text conversation between two young girls in addition to some unnecessary recaps, there are hard-hitting emotional moments (grandma's phone call will make you cry), a reliably creepy atmosphere, and a fun DIY horror vibe.

Don't get me wrong, this is no Jaws. We're still in the found footage realm here, a disgusting swamp ruled by the powerful tyrant [REC], but the slow burn horror and surprisingly sharp social commentary pack a whallop that puts The Bay in the top tier of its brethren.

TL;DR: The Bay is way way way better than it has any right or reason to be.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend $1.20 On This? Heck yeah, if you're in the mood for horror a little more subtle than an in-your-face haunted house flick, the likes of which seem to be flourishing this season.

Word Count: 1127

DreadBox: Hellabama

Year: 2012

Director: Terron R. Parsons

Cast: Richard Tyson, Sherri Eakin, Jeremy Ivy

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Sergio and I have been frequenting this delicious pizza place close to campus called Pizzamania because pizza is the foundation of our relationship. Last time we went, we were planning on sneaking on campus to watch us some Game of Thrones and on a whim we grabbed some RedBox movies from the 7-Eleven next door.

I've always been morbidly curious about the dire looking Direct-To-DVD horror that RedBox always seems to have on hand in spades so in addition to The Bling Ring, I grabbed a promising looking slasher called Hayride and thus was born what is certainly going to be one of my favorite blog features. Be prepared for a tidal wave of even more lo-fi horror!

Why do I do this to myself?

Because, God knows, nobody else will.

Hayride tells the story of college student Steven (Jeremy Ivy of absolutely nothing else) who brings his girlfriend Amanda (Sherri Eakin) to his uncle's home in Alabama because 1) It's Halloween Break, which I guess could be a thing, and 2) He doesn't seem to actually have parents.

Every year, his Uncle Morgan (Richard Tyson) puts on a Halloween Hayride, a sort of haunted house event for the community. The main villain in this hayride is Pitchfork, a fictional killer based on a town myth about a farmer who went crazy when his daughter ran off with her boyfriend and started killing everybody. Amanda says that sounds like lazy writing and I'd have to agree. 

There is a weak sort of meta humor at work here, like the filmmakers were vaguely aware that Scream was a thing, but didn't quite piece together that it was necessary to actually be funny.

Or that direct quotations from other movies only work if you actually try to make them scary.

OK, maybe that's unfair.

Yes, to be a slasher movie in today's world means riffing on the already long-established rules of the genre and there's gonna be some references in there. And Hayride doesn't plagiarize as much as most, mainly because it's too busy expanding upon its tedious and convoluted mythology. In the middle of the film, in the guise of a campfire story we get a ten minute, dialogue-free flashback sequence that clarifies the Pitchfork legend about as much as if a child were fingerpainting it.

This point comes at about 45 minutes into the story and not a single member of the massive core cast has even come close to thinking about maybe dying at some point in the future. And there's considerably less hayride than I was expecting.

Although, with all the loving close-ups of Amanda's butt, who would even notice?

The ending does pick up as the hayride begins and employees and guests are picked off by the dozens. Oh, did I mention an escaped convict stole the Pitchfork costume? Yeah that happened. So finally Hayride provides at least a little of the low rent thrills I was expecting as Pitchfork mows down waves of hayriders like some demented MMORPG quest.

Unfortunately the whole thing suffers beyond repair because it positively reeks of prosumer equipment. I've seen student films with higher production values, and I go to a state school. The color balance is knocked out of whack with the yellow cranked up to eleven, presumably to emphasize the theme of... hay, I guess. At least one line in every scene has been altered in post-production dubbing and 100% does not synchronize with the lips of anybody onscreen.

And, like I said before, not too much is stolen directly from other films (although the film does read like a checklist of the slasher section of TVTropes.com), but the main theft struck me straight to the bone. My absolute favorite shot of Cold Prey 2, a car door opening and closing as filmed through a side mirror, is lifted with fearless aplomb, presumably because they assumed nobody had ever seen it. Well, kudos for at least watching one of the best slasher sequels that exists. Clearly it didn't help though.

After the killing winds down and the quasi-Final Girl sequence has begun in earnest, the film degrades again with a twist ending that would maybe be effective if we knew anything about the killer.

I'mma spoil this because screw Hayride. The cops in charge of the investigation unmask the dead Pitchfork killer, revealing an old man who patently isn't the escaped convict we saw in the beginning of the film. Who he is, I couldn't say. But the sheriff goes "I know who that is" as the music swells and we get an unnecessary flashback of him killing the convict much earlier in the film as if we couldn't understand that if it's a different person under the mask, he's not the one who did it.

So the sheriff knows but he doesn't deign to tell us.

Maybe he saw him on WWE or something.

I don't know about you, but I don't feel too swell when a movie holds me, the audience, in active contempt.

Crap movie. Seacrest out.

Killer: Pitchfork (Bennett Wayne Dean Sr.)

Final Girl: Amanda (Sherri Eakin)

Best Kill: A sheriff is, with great deliberation, stabbed in the neck with the "sharp" end of an open pair of handcuffs.

Sign of the Times: Basically, the fact that this exists at all and is being distributed.

Scariest Moment: Hayride passengers run away through the forest, but are caught in bear traps. They are completely forgotten about for the rest of the movie, and presumably left to die of starvation and exposure or be forced to 127 Hours their way outta there. (Isn't it sad that the most horror-y scenario isn't even in the script?)

Weirdest Moment: For fun, Steven's family used to quiz each other on microwave instructions.

Champion Dialogue: "Let's rock these people's lives and give them the show of their lives!"

Body Count: 21 (including the killer), but it absolutely does not earn such a hilariously inflated number.

TL;DR: Hayride is a prosumer slasher attempt that manages the rare feat of having me long for the relative thematic coherence of the execrable Memorial Day.

Rating: 2/10

Should I Spend $1.20 On This? Don't do that to yourself. I do this so you don't have to.

Word Count: 1068