This Honky Grandma Be Trippin'

Year: 2015

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

M. Night Shyamalan. A once proud director whose name has since become a punchline not even Fozzie Bear could screw up. After helming one of my favorite horror flicks of all time, The Sixth Sense, he took a break from filmmaking. Though, that isn’t to say he quit directing. After a string of increasingly mediocre twist pictures, he began one of history’s longest sustained barrages of box office duds, smashing his credibility to smithereens with high profile dreck like The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth.

So here we sit, a good decade between us and his last remotely appealing film. Enter Jason Blum. Given free reign and an appropriately miniscule budget, our M. Night is afforded one last chance to get his groove back: the found footage thriller The Visit. So, did it work? Let’s journey over the river and through the woods to find out.

To grandmother’s Blumhouse we go.

In The Visit, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) is making a documentary. A young film buff, she has decided to record herself and her younger brother Tim (Ed Oxenbould) while they spend a week at their grandparents’ isolated farmhouse. Their mother (Kathryn Hahn) has been estranged from her parents for 15 years, so Becca is hoping that this trip  - which also allows mom to spend some quality time with her new boyfriend – will be an opportunity to both meet her grandparents and attempt to rebuild a long-burned bridge.

Almost immediately, things take a turn for the wacked-out. Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) are outwardly kind and charming. But after 9:30 PM, Nana takes after her famous cookies and goes a little nuts, rattling ferociously around the house in the nude. Becca’s borderline compulsive instinct to chalk things up to “old people, am I right?” quickly wears thin as the serene winter visit quickly descends into nightmare.

Don’t mind the creaking. It’s just an old house.

If you take only one thing from this review, make it this: In spite of obvious deficiencies, The Visit is Shyamalan’s best work in a decade and change. It also leaves the distinct impression of a writer-director endeavoring to regain his instincts, not always succeeding but slowly earning back his goodwill. The seasoned Shyamalan watcher (I’m sorry, by the way) will notice DNA of his favorite themes lodged within The Visit like pineapples in an upside–down cake. There’s the obligatory twist, of course, though he knows by now that he needs to pull back from the showboating endings that defined and capsized his middling works.

We also get a return to his Signs standby of child characters with ludicrously specific quirks that – of course – come into play in the finale (“I’ve compulsively memorized every song in the Taylor Swift discography! Gee, I sure hope those junior high girls outside stop trying to murder us.”). This trope, she does not work too well. It’s blatantly telegraphed and it makes less than no sense, but just like the wan family drama laced through the whole thing, you can tell he’s trying and it’s hard to begrudge him of that. Plus, after the hot dog speech in The Happening, I’m not exactly fazed by a couple dud payoffs. At least what I’m watching physically resembles a motion picture.

There’s some scattered slick patches of ineptitude spread throughout The Visit: exposition that’s indicated with huge neon lettering, idiotic character decisions at every turn, intentionally inaccurate language used to obfuscate a twist, and a strong sense that the script dearly wished it took place in the 90’s. But these are flaws The Visit comes by naturally and genuinely. It might be far from perfection, but it’s a totally serviceable found footage feature with a delightful mixture of spooky and kooky.

And just a little ooky.

I’m legitimately astonished at how much fun I had watching The Visit. In fact, it might be the perfect coda to the found footage fad, which hit a resurgence with Paranormal Activity and died a lonely death with Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, nor could it, but it utilizes its perspective in a satisfying manner, even physically incorporating the camera into the action, a trick I haven’t seen since the only good moment in the abysmal 2008 remake Quarantine.

The slightly misaligned shots offer the merest whiff of realism, allowing the scare gags (which follow Paranormal Activity’s recurring nightly pattern) to creep under your skin a little at a time. The slow boil shocks are generally effective, utilizing offscreen space well and offering a glimpse into a world just slightly to the left of normal. For a while, the “it’s just a creaky old grandma” excuses are even believable. The tension builds and builds, deftly playing with the audience. In one of my favorite scenes, a scare is revealed to be something mundane until a subtle last minute reversal clues you into the fact that something is terribly wrong here. You’ll know it when you see it, and that kind of moment proves that Shyamalan might just be back on track to give us nightmares again.

The most unexpected joy to be found in The Visit is that it’s funny. It’s not Sam Raimi slapstick hilarity, but a kind of down-home quiet humor permeates the film. I suppose this tone should have been expected from the casting of Kathryn Hahn, one of our generation’s most underrated comic actresses, but it melds so perfectly with the darker horror elements that you almost don’t even notice it’s there. It’s just a subtle undertone in the background that flavors the world of the film with another shade of reality. They do occasionally derail into nightmarishly goofy territory that would make Adam Sandler blush (no spoilers, but if you’re familiar with the Pokérap, you’ll get some disconcerting déjà vu), but for the most part, the balance is pitch perfect.

The Visit’s surprisingly quality can largely be attributed to the performers, who sell the hell out of a somewhat silly conceit. Oxenbould somehow inhabits an utterly smackable character and makes him into the film’s best comic asset, DeJonge shows some remarkable nuance, subtly altering her performance to shift between reality and when she’s vamping for the camera, and both the grandparents give remarkably unsettling physical performances that somehow evoke both kindly grandparents and looming birds of prey.

There’s really a lot to like about The Visit. It’s an impure jewel, to be certain, but a jewel just the same. With this enticing blend of found footage frights and childlike comic antics, Shyamalan has achieved the impossible: I’m actually excited for his next film.

TL;DR: The Visit is Shyamalan's best film in a decade.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1139

No Noose Is Good Noose

Year: 2015

Director: Travis Cluff & Chris Lofing

Cast: Reese Mishler, Pfeifer Brown, Ryan Shoos

Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I suppose one of these days I should stop getting excited about found footage horror films. They’re this generation’s carnival hucksters, promising spectacular thrills and spills, pouring all their genuinely impressive showmanship into the marketing for what is inevitably a ramshackle display, stuffed with straw and patched with safety pins and gum.

I fell for As Above, So Below, an insipid Parisian adventure movie with more ideas than intellect. I fell for Devil’s Due, a bland, unnecessary demonic pregnancy flick that gives away its own ending in the first two minutes. And, god help me, I fell for The Pyramid, which had the gall to drag one of the heavy hitters of Egyptian mythology down with it. That said, I am beyond excited for Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, which seems resigned to being apocalyptically insipid (it’s found footage, a combo prequel/sequel, and in 3D, for crying out loud – this is my Holy Grail), so I respect it for that. But I digress.

The slop filling up our trough today is The Gallows, which burst onto the scene a couple months ago with one of the best teasers I’ve ever seen, before proceeding to rip it to shreds by pre-releasing about 8,000 clips, only about half of which actually ended up in the movie, but all of which betray the dreadfully generic quality of literally everything in the film but the single two minute segment displayed in the teaser. I suppose it’s appropriate that a film geared toward the millennial generation should be defeated by over-sharing, but it beaks my heart that my enthusiasm had to be nibbled to death by tiny gnashing jaws instead of – as per usual – swallowed in one massive gulp.

Being a horror fan is like hugging a woodchipper and hoping you don’t get splinters.

The Gallows begins in 1993 with a home video of a high school play – a stuffy, Crucible-esque bore titled The Gallows, in which a squire dresses as a nobleman to win the heart of a fair maiden or some drivel. He is sentenced to death by hanging, but when the gallows prop goes wrong, the young actor is accidentally killed during the performance. I honestly don’t know what they expected, considering that the prop was literally just a fully functioning gallows sitting on a high school stage, but I suppose we must forgive a horror film its premise.

Seriously, please tell me the way this kid was not going to die. Did they forget to do a dress rehearsal?

Anyway, cut to 2013. Ryan (Ryan Shoos) is a football player who has been hired by the drama department to film their goings-on because this is a found footage movie. The school is putting on a revival of The Gallows, led by the spirited and irritating Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown). Ryan’s best friend and teammate Reese (Reese Mishler) is playing the lead because he has a crush on Pfeifer, but he sucks as an actor, so Ryan suggests that they sneak into the theater the night before the play with his girlfriend Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) and wreck the set. That way the play won’t go on and Pfeifer can fall into Reese’s comforting arms. It’s a win-win. He says they’ll need utmost stealth so they don’t get caught, but he brings his camera along, because this is a found footage movie.

During their escapade they run into Pfeifer, so they call it off, but they find themselves locked in for the night. And who should show up but the angry ghost of Charlie (the kid who died), dressed as the hangman, grown to adult size – don’t ask questions – and eager to play, noose at the ready.

As if high school theater wasn’t nerve-wracking enough, man.

After wasting what feels like weeks of our time on exposition that amounts to nothing more than “the dudes are stereotypical douchey jocks and the screenwriters think people still use the word schnozz” in a laboriously hyperextended sequence utterly devoid of scares or nuance, finally something happens. And by “something,” I mean “still nothing.” The characters rattle around the empty school for a couple more weeks, argue with each other in that most found footagey of fashions, wander off alone in blatantly incorrect directions down creepy maintenance hallways, flirt with making it an even month, then shake their camera at a ghost. I really don’t think I would even bother with these things if [REC] hadn’t screwed me up so bad. I suppose it’s either this or trauma counseling, and at least movie tickets are ten bucks an hour instead of a hundred.

To the film’s credit, the production design and lighting scheme are at times genuinely spooky. The cinematographer lovingly bestows the stage dressing with weight, always launching the noose into the shot in stark silhouette, allowing it to eat up the frame with its sheer presence. And the night vision color scheme has been done to death, but The Gallows finds a unique aesthetic presence, using the school’s cherry red emergency lights to flood the sets – intensely flattening the film’s dimensionality, pushing it into your face and drenching it in the color of blood. In fact, this trick is used in the film’s single best scene – the one used for the teaser and which has absolutely no valuable context in the narrative. Wheee.

Beyond those two elements (and that one, insolubly terrific scene), The Gallows doesn’t have much going on for it above the typical found footage fare. Once it gets kicking, it’s a decent jack-in-the-box of jump scares, but any feeling it generates will evaporate the instant the credits roll.

Kind of like your appreciation for trailers by the time the fifth one comes on.

It’s fun enough if you’re into that sort of thing: expect a lot of dumb teens making the exact decisions that are most statistically likely to lead to their doom, actors with blank CVs portraying blanker characters, and a camera that craps out at the exact moments that things begin to get interesting.

The plot is at least mildly more layered and interesting than your average “teens trapped overnight” fare, though its various twists and turns can literally be extrapolated from the film’s first two lines by anyone with even an ounce of genre savvy. In fairness, when Sergio and I accurately predicted the ending of this film, we each foresaw equal and opposite halves of the climax. So maybe you’ll be mildly surprised by a slight unforeseen detail, and in a film as rote as this, that’s as monumental as freaking Rosebud.

Of course this is all torn apart by an utterly unnecessary epilogue that overexplains, contradicts, and actively spits upon everything that’s already happened in the movie. I mean, I’m not saying there’s nothing worth spitting upon in The Gallows, but that’s my job, not the film’s. SPOILERS: [The ending rips the ghost from his final resting place, implying that he haunts his girlfriend’s apartment, hanging up his noose on the coat hook, all “honey, I’m home!” a la Desi Arnaz.] Well, that’s what I get for trying to be nice.

TL;DR: The Gallows is a laborious, generic found footage movie.
Rating: 4/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Bring a date who's never seen one of these before and cuddle. Otherwise, skip it.
Word Count: 1244

The Ghost In The Machine

Trigger Warning: I'd just like to make it known that any sarcasm around the suicide of character Laura Barns is a dig at the screenwriters and nothing more. Suicide is a serious and devastating act. If you or a friend have been having suicidal thoughts, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1 (800) 273-8255.

Year: 2015

Director: Leo Gabriadze

Cast: Shelly Hennig, Moses Jacob Storm, Heather Sossaman

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I have seen the future and its name is Blumhouse. Their model for low budget flicks has proved successful many times in the past, but their horror offerings have been largely traditional up until now. However, their newest theatrical endeavor, Unfriended, pushes the envelope. 

Originally created as an MTV film, Unfriended is... well, it's the Skype movie. There's no way around that one. As far as I can trace it, this is the first computer-only movie ever produced, or at the very least the first released theatrically*. I'm always interested when Hollywood filmmaking incorporates modern technology and social media (mostly to an unbearably lame degree, like a grandma texting you in all caps), and this new film is perhaps the most focused and accurate reproduction of teen interactions with the Internet that I've ever seen, though it's married to a plot that even Adam Sandler would find hackneyed and overplayed.

*UPDATE: It turns out I got a tad carried away when making this assertion. This cinematic style has predecessors in the 2014 Elijah Wood thriller Open Windows, the garbagetastic 2012 V/H/S segment obnoxiously entitled "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger," and the 2013 cult thriller The Den. Though, to be fair, Unfriended is the first film with a scope beyond the indie bubble, and it's the first one to invest in a fully immersive desktop experience.

I'm sorry, the number you have dialed could not be bothered to come up with a better story.

The occurrence of Unfriended, which I'm going to go ahead and call a "story" for clarity's sake, goes as such: A group of high school friends has a group Skype chat one night, on what is implied to be the anniversary of the suicide of their classmate Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman). After a video of Laura soiling herself at a party went viral on YouTube, she was bullied relentlessly online until she shot herself on a baseball field. It's a needlessly showy way to go, but it makes more sense than a good 98 percent of The Happening's self-mutilations, so we're going to let it slide.

You know what? I take it back. More movies need to have people feeding themselves to lions.

These friends are all quite douchey, but in richly unique, complexly variable ways like fine wines: There's Blaire (Shelly Hennig of Ouija), a supposed good girl with a wicked streak and our de facto protagonist through whose computer screen we view the ensuing events; Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), Blaire's dull as dishwater boyfriend and a hopelessly dependent toerag; Adam (Will Peltz), the fledgling bro who looks like he was birthed from one of those beer bottle pyramids in a dingy frat house; Jess (Renee Olstead of The Secret Life of the American Teenager), who may or may not be Adam's girlfriend and is pretty useless otherwise; Ken (Jacob Wysocki of Pitch Perfect), who is good at computers and looks like Chunk from the Goonies if he grew up watching Entourage reruns; and Val (Courtney Halverson), who nobody really likes. And when these people don't like someone, you know something's up.

So, when these crazy kids begin their Skype hangout, they notice a mysterious blank profile is logged on as well. Despite all their efforts to get rid of it, it persists like acne on prom night. During this sequence there's a bit of dead space in the narrative as the kids log off and on again an aggravating number of times. But things start to perk up when the profile speaks out, revealing itself to be Laura Barns' account and challenging the friends to a deadly game of Never Have I Ever. 

As everybody's deepest, darkest secrets are revealed, Laura's spirit possesses their bodies one by one and forces them to kill themselves on camera. 

Teens these days, am I right?

By far the best element of Unfriended is the introduction of cyber horror as a legitimate concept with real potency. Going into the film, I was worried that the static screen and lack of camera movement would inhibit the film's value as cinema, but it absolutely does not. Like it or not, we're living in a plugged-in world and the massive shifts in how we view media play right in to the film's central conceit. 

The plot is kept moving through the interplay of many different web sites and apps, the biggest boon to the film being that they forked over the licensing money to actually use Facebook, iMessage, and whatnot. It's just not quite as intense when your lead is being threatened over Splashface Messenger. It only suffers a tiny bit from stilted TeenSpeak, and most everything a regular old movie might toss in the fray is diegetically provided with gusto.

You don't have a soundtrack? Wham, Blaire's Spotify playlist is at your service. You need to disguise a chintzy gore effect? Bam. The video's buffering, wouldn't you know? It all makes sense in the world of the narrative, and much of it is quite clever. Some of the soundscape is fictional, though it's not bothersome. And some of the Internet connection speeds are highly J. K. Rowling-level fanciful, but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth on that one.

But in spite of all its conceptual proficiency, Unfriended is just like every other middling teen fright flick we've seen before. It's not in the least bit spooky and bereft of bite beyond the surface-level cyberbullying narrative that it proves hesitant to explore. It exists solely to exist, much like the mass-produced found footage flicks of the past decade, a genre barely a stone's throw away from the cyberpunk path Unfriended is carving. It might seem shiny and new, but it has all the classic flaws of 2000's horror: unlikeable characters, a derivative plotline long past its sell-by date, and a concept that outstretches its budget.

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It's a real shame, is what it is. The plot never rises above its watered down post-Saw torture game concept (already achieved more adeptly - and far more timely - in films like Truth or Die, Would You Rather?, and even Nine Dead), and the scares are anemic at best. There's only so many times a Skype bubble appearing out of nowhere has the capacity to startle. And the characters are so ignobly irritating that it's more of a relief when they die than a shock.

But hey. What horror film isn't flawed? Some of Unfriended's flaws are quite damaging, but it has a strong original framework for its story, a couple wonderful gags that blossom from that conceit, and the acting is overall pretty decent. Considering that this film almost went straight to TV, the performance skill going into Unfriended is utterly remarkable. Taking on those enormously technical long takes while maintaining character and dialogue is a true challenge and they rise to it convincingly.

All in all, Unfriended is a fun time at the movies, but don't go in expecting to scream your eyebrows off. As a story it is basic to the utmost degree, but as an experience it is utterly unique.

Although I'd argue that the film is not improved by being blown up to theatrical screen proportions, this is perhaps the one film in existence that would work better on VOD. An immersive all-computer experience might just the shot in the arm the film needs to pack a punch. Pumping Unfriended into your computer screen must be like tapping directly into the Matrix, and I'd highly suggest giving that a whirl. 

TL;DR: Unfriended has a clever premise with follow-through, but its plot is generic and it lacks all but the most basic of scares.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'm always behind supporting original horror, so if you want to see it in the theaters, you have my blessing, but I really and truly believe that this film was meant to be viewed on VOD. Either way it's a decently fun time.

Word Count: 1428

The Sand Lot

Year: 2014

Director: Grégory Levasseur

Cast: Ashley Hinshaw, James Buckley, Denis O'Hare

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

"The Pyramid is not found footage," says everyone. So why does it put so much effort into including the most generic and boring tropes of the waning cinéma vérité genre? We get a documentary crew following a team of archaeologists, a preposterous amount of awkwardly shoved-in cameras used to display footage (including the most technologically sophisticated, high-def webcam to ever hit the shelves), the We Must Keep Filming Because the Camera Has A Light trope, audio-visual feedback when scary things begin to happen, stark black and white title cards with no credits at the beginning, and - oh yeah - the movie is shot handheld by its own characters.

Tossing in some pedestrian musical score and occasional shots that couldn't possibly be achieved unless the monsters had their own Go-Pros doesn't make The Pyramid a non-found footage movie. It just makes it an extremely irritating one.

But at the very least, that's one sexy pyramid. Woof.

So. We have what I'm going to go ahead and call a found footage movie about Egypt. That's cool, I guess. The Pyramid wins points by including at least one Egyptian character amongst the lily white proceedings. He's naturally the first to be culled from the pack, but it's December horror. We takes what we gets.

The plot revolves around a father-daughter archaeology team - Nora (Ashley Hinshaw) and Holden (American Horror Story's Denis O'Hare), who have recently used satellite technology to discover a rare three-sided pyramid buried deep beneath the Egyptian desert. By the looks of it though, the only technology Hinshaw has touched recently is an elliptical machine, because there is no earthly explanation for how apocalyptically hot this supposed archaeologist is.

Hollywood is a turgid swamp where female scientists have perfect make-up and double D's, yet we're led to believe that both Sofía Vergara and Scarlett Johansson will give Jon Favreau the time of day.

They are accompanied by Michael Zahir (Amir K), a robotics technician who is perplexingly referred to by either his first or last name depending on the mood of the screenwriters or possibly the phases of the moon. He appears to be in some poorly sketched-out relationship with Nora despite the fact that his character is introduced while he uses a three million dollar cambot to spy on her changing in her tent. Just guys being dudes, I suppose.

This trio is being followed by the indefatigable documentarian Sunni (Christa Nicola) and her cameraman Fitzie (James Buckley). When political unrest in Cairo reaches its peak, the team is instructed to evacuate the camp, but - god love those archaeologists - they can't stomach the thought of leaving without taking a peek inside that dang pyramid. Inevitably they get trapped inside with sinister... sphinx cats. They dodge these wicked... cats and navigate ancient Indiana Jones traps, only to discover that something far more nefarious is rumbling in the stone structure's depths.

I'm only a little bit kidding.

All I can say is that, while The Pyramid ends up being pretty stupid, it's not nearly as stupid as it could have been, what with its early, thankfully fruitless intimations about pyramids being alien receivers. But as it stands, it's still full of brainless characters dribbling shallow dialogue about a poorly represented culture. There's a couple decent shock gags, but they come few and far between, sandwiched within mountains of pseudo-history and nonexistent character moments (Sunni is a rock climber, Holden doesn't like his daughter hanging out with boys, Fitzie is a whiny prick, it's not exactly Tennessee Williams).

The actors aren't given a lot to work with, but none of them rise to the challenge either. Even Denis O'Hare grapples with the dialogue, which is as rough-hewn as the limestone chunks in the pyramid walls ("Stop being an archaeologist and be a human being!" "We're like food in a bowl down here."). The others might as well have their scripts in their hands, because each word-heavy scene feels like a first readthrough and Hinshaw especially is too shallow a vessel for the profoundly verbose science exposition she is burdened with.

"According to his heteronormative psychoplasty categorization, this man is suffering from acute deoxyribonucleic deterioration and I want to inflict a bilateral periorbital hematoma on whoever made me say this."

It's viable enough as throwaway popcorn entertainment, but the finale is pointlessly galling and by the time Nora is trapped between [a couple hissing sphinx cats] and [the actual Egyptian god Anubis], unable to figure out that she should [just run through the cats. They're cats.], you want to scream with irate frustration until your lungs implode. There's also some shoddy CGI tossed in for good measure, just to make sure you really feel it.

But up until that point, The Pyramid is a mostly engaging generic thriller about moderately interesting human beings trapped in a place where they patently shouldn't be. It's entirely possible to slip out of the movie for 20 minutes or so and slide back in without missing a beat, making the film the ideal date night treat for young couples looking to get their mack on in the dark. It's perfect - The Pyramid is easy to follow, it's not scary enough that your wimpier half will want to ditch, and there's bound to be next to nobody in the theater to interrupt your illicit back row rendezvous. And it's not like the dialogue is actually valuable to listen to in order to retain the shape of the plot.

My carbon dating would seem to indicate that these carvings were made by ancient Egyptians.

But in the field of 2014 horror, The Pyramid is just a blip on the radar. Like Ouija before it, it's harmless if pointless entertainment. Annoying genre categorization and confounding third act aside, it's not really bad enough to hate, though it's not nearly good enough to applaud. It's merely another middling horror effort in a year that isn't quite inspiring in any direction.

TL;DR: The Pyramid is annoying at times, but it's decent enough as popcorn horror.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? If you feel like it, given what I have to say. Bring someone to smooch.

Word Count: 1047

Paris Je Lame

Year: 2014

Director: John Erick Dowdle

Cast: Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for the first half hour of As Above, So Below. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Found Footage. 

Found Footage is what brings us together today. It awoke in America with The Blair Witch Project, slumbered peacefully until the advent of the Paranormal Activity franchise, and reached its brightest dream with the Spanish cinematic sledgehammer that is [REC]. But instead of hibernating once more, awaiting its resurgence like the behemoth that is the 3D fad, found footage stayed quite active, festering at the fringes of mainstream society, setting in like a permanent rot on the eaves of Hollywood.

You see, unlike 3D, found footage costs almost nothing to make. There's no extra processing fees, no unwieldy cameras. It's no fiscal strain to crack open a prosumer camcorder from Target. Loving the fact that this cinéma vérité trend kept their wallets nice and limber, studios have been keeping the subgenre on life support, refusing to pull the plug.

In fact, this year already saw two found footage releases (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and Devil's Due) within two weeks of each other. Now, I'm a big fan of this filmmaking style - it's a delightful way to thrust oneself into a new world and the genre produced my favorite film of all time - and find something to love in even the most tawdry of shaky cam nasties (Save one - Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead, which you may never get a review of considering the fact that the only way I'll be able to sit through it again is if it's playing in my funeral home. And that's just because I won't have had enough time to teach my incorporeal ectoplasmic form how to change the channel.).

So I find no problem in the current FF boom, nor do I side with the common recent complaint that casting recognizable actors ruins the illusion (news flash - nobody actually believes these movies to be real anymore - that idea died with Heather Donahue in Blair Witch). But I do take issue with the outrageously mistaken concept that using the found footage gimmick can cloak egregious story flaws thanks to its artificial realism (and, more importantly, still make a metric buttload of return on investment).

You bet your sweet bippy I'm going somewhere with this.

As Above, So Below starts off well enough. In fact, it starts off fascinating. [LAST CALL FOR FIRST ACT SPOILERS] Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), an intrepid young scholar, wants to continue the lifelong quest of her recently deceased father - namely, finding the sorcerer's philosopher's stone, the fabled alchemic token that can grant eternal life. She ropes in her Aramaic-speaking friend George (Ben Feldman) to help her with translation and young filmmaker Benji (Edwin Hodge, the Stranger from The Purge) to create a documentary about her pursuit of the stone through the catacombs of Paris.

On their way, they gather three experienced Parisian cave-explorers, only one of whom, Papillon (François Civil), is particularly important because he is very handsome. So, things happen and they end up exploring a possibly cursed uncharted tunnel of the catacombs in their pursuit of the stone (and the treasure rumored to be buried with it). Some nasty things begin to happen, but the trailer has spoiled enough, so this is where we get off the plot train.

And onto the... analysis... bus? Captions are hard.

Aside from the dazzlingly out-of-left-field plot device provided by the presence of the philosopher's stone in the narrative, As Above, So Below also boasts a tremendously intriguing mixture of ancient cultures and religious iconography, as well as calling influence from such classic films as The Descent, Indiana Jones, Aladdin, National Treasure, and even Enchanted (more than once, if you can believe it).

This dense array of narrative elements sets out a keen and complex bed for the themes and plot to lay on. Unfortunately, after a night of hard drinking, they prefer to sleep on the floor. By the time the film crosses the 90 minute finish line, it has absolutely bungled almost each and every one of the elements that seemed so promising in the beginning, bogging down the insightful thematic material with needlessly generic jump scares and piercingly inane, resolutely muddled plot beats.

The fact that amid the piffling nonsense, the film gives the viewer anything to parse out and discuss afterwards is a triumph, but As Above, So Below could so easily have been a ten out of ten film that it's hard to come out of it tasting anything other than the bitter tang of defeat.

And the faint, but ineradicable aftertaste of Nicolas Cage.

I can't dig into the film too much because, again, spoilers, but there are enough wan plot devices in the first third to accurately exemplify the kind of execrable nonsense one is likely to encounter later on. First off, we're meant to believe that our sexy young leads have had the time and inclination to study an entire encyclopedia's worth of culture, science, and language, spreading across centuries. These kids do have masters degrees, but every time they go from zero to Copernicus in the blink of an eye, it reeks of movie magic, bringing one out of the movie far swifter than any vaguely recognizable genre actor could have.

And my doctor says I have to cut down on snark in my diet, so I'll limit myself to one more nitpick, but it's a big'un. A hastily translated Aramaic passage rhymes. In English. Something tells me that the ancient civilization that penned the inscription hadn't quite planned far enough ahead to anticipate the development of anglophone linguistics. Not unless Marty McFly had something to do with it. But then again, the lack of Chuck Berry lyrics would seem to rule that hypothesis out.

But this is a movie, not a doctoral thesis. Who cares about rhyme scheme? As Above, So Below is efficiently scary, disorienting, claustrophobic, and effective, justifying its documentary aspects with relative ease. So that alone makes it one of the better found footage efforts of the decade. It utilizes its budgetary limitations to tremendous effect especially in terms of set design, it creates tension within the audience even when it doesn't deserve it, and it tells a story that falls flat, but at least it takes the leap in the first place.

So what if the premise doesn't pan out one hundred percent? So what if the third act feels more like a Da Vinci Code-themed Universal Horror Nights maze? It provokes a feeling in the audience and conceptually, there's nothing else quite like it. It'll never be an enduring classic, but as a stepping stone toward a sleeker, better genre, As Above, So Below is essential viewing.

TL;DR: As Above, So Below is a waste of a brilliant premise, but in terms of scares remains a rather strong genre picture.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Skip it in theaters. This is definitely a RedBox movie. Save it for a rainy day. Lower your expectations, drop a blanket on your bod, and have a good time.

Word Count: 1210

Fright Flashback: Found Footage

Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating Earth to Echo, a found footage E.T. throwback. In celebration, We'll be revisiting The Blair Witch Project, the most influential found footage picture of all time.

Year: 1999

Director: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez
Cast: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard
Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

There is no film that caused more of a stir in the late 90's than The Blair Witch Project, and for good reason. The horror genre had been languishing for an entire decade and change. It was briefly reinvigorated by the release of Scream, but had since returned to increasingly low-rent slasher knockoffs. It was as if the entire genre was taking a deep breath, waiting for the moment when all of a sudden this mysterious little nanobudget found footage flick burst onto the scene and became a massive phenomenon.

Contrary to popular belief (most facts about this film are contrary to popular belief), Blair Witch is not the first found footage horror film. No, that distinction goes to the notorious Cannibal Holocaust, an Italian film so realistic that the director was arrested shortly after its release. A few more entries in the genre were released in the decade that followed, but time has long since forgotten them.

But when you're earning over ten thousand dollars per dollar you spent on a film, you're not gonna be dithering about subgenre history. 

It saves a lot of budget money if your cast isn't around to collect their salaries.

Which allows me to effortlessly segue into the brilliant mechanism that made Blair Witch explode the way it did. The ingenious viral promotional campaign was among the first of its kind, utilizing the young Internet in a way that blew the lid off of everything people knew about film advertisement.

Trailers? Posters? Press releases? Screw that! Rig them with dynamite and knock them off a cliff! Sure, in actuality the film had all these things, but what really made the people take notice, grabbing them by the throats and pulling them in, was the internet campaign. It all started with a web site detailing the history of the Blair Witch "myth," detailing the exploits of this fabled creature through history, finishing up with the story of three student filmmakers who vanished in the Maryland woods in October 1994 when attempting to shoot a documentary about her.

As the film neared completion, more information was added to the web site about new evidence - the discovery of two cameras around the area where the three kids vanished. According to the page, the families of the three students tearfully requested that the footage of their final days be compiled together to hopefully suss out the truth about their fate.

This was revolutionary. For those who grew up out of the influence of this film, it's perhaps a little hard to believe looking from a place of millenial cynicism, but to nearly everybody during the first few weeks of Blair Witch's run, this film was real. I mean, even their IMDb pages read "missing, presumed dead." This was a time before most people had even figured out how to put signatures on their emails and the filmmakers were creating an entirely immersive online universe. It blindsided absolutely everyone.

I was two and a half months old when these photos took place. There is no evidence to the contrary that the Blair Witch was not an infant. The investigation is ongoing.

Blair Witch was one of the very first horror films I ever watched when I was starting to get into them (at the extreme level that I am today) in the Summer of 2011. Revisiting it three years later, my goal was to determine - out of all the influence and power that the film had over its audience - what of that actually shows up onscreen when the film is taken by itself, devoid of context.

The truth is, it isn't very much. It's not an out and out terrible film like some contrarians have complained in recent years, but without its immensely successful promotional campaign, the film wouldn't have made a splash at all.

The Blair Witch Project is the story of Heather (Heather Donahue), a young film student whose pet project is a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch. The intrepid young lass intends to camp out in the woods around Burkittsville, the city formally known as Blair, and see what cool footage she can get. She ropes her grunge-to-capacity friend Josh (Joshua Leonard) into helping her shoot it and he brings his friend Mike (Michael C. Williams) along to work audio.

It goes without saying that they never find their way back.

Come on, don't cry. It's not even spoilers, we just talked about it.

Right off the bat, there are several things the film does very well. First and foremost, it creates credible characters in its student documentary team, an incredibly important accomplishment considering that these three are the only characters onscreen throughout the entire film after minute 13. This is compounded by the found footage aspect which, like no other film after it, fully succeeds at using its cinéma vérité style to create depth and realism.

They're not the most likable characters in the world, but likability is something far different from reality. These are young men and women with their own sets of foibles (Mike is a little too hotheaded, Josh is kind of clueless, Heather is self-important and thinks she has all the answers), which lends credence to the conceit that this footage is nonficition. I can attest, I sat next to girls like Heather and guys like Josh all semester.

(WARNING: WE ARE ENTERING SPOILERS TERRITORY. I DON'T SPOIL THE END OR ANYTHING - I'M NOT AN IDIOT. BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM, STOP HERE. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU GO IN NOT KNOWING WHAT I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE REST OF THE FILM.)

Get that camera out of here. This is a spoiling zone.

Sitting next to those students was just as tortuous as the middle third of the film turns out to be. Although Blair Witch handles its scare sequences with hardscrabble tact and grace (this film works much on the same level as The Descent, introducing a primary danger - being lost - to keep the audience on their toes before ever even hinting at the secondary, more perilous danger - the witch or, you know, whatever), those sequences only work exactly once.

Due to the film's reliance on the power of suggestion for its scares rather than anything visual whatsoever, the film's rewatch value is nil. I'm not claiming that we needed to see the witch for the film to be effective and the "creepy noises" scenes are still creepy, but after one viewing of the film, it's difficult to latch onto the scenario once more with the forehand knowledge that nothing is actually going to happen.

Instead the film becomes a dire slog between listless scare scenes, punctuated with endless arguments. The beginning and the end are still tremendous, but the core of the film just isn't there upon revisitation. The lack of budget really shows and the seams become exposed. Blair Witch is a phenomenon, and I invite all who haven't seen it to appreciate the magic of an initial viewing, but it's not worth sitting through a second time - there's nothing to the film beyond its basic campfire scares.

Its simplicity ends up killing it and it becomes far too easy for the mind to wander after the initial shock has worn off. So yes, it's still a classic. It's a fascinating tentpole in the horror history of the late 20th century. But you won't catch me at any revival screenings searching for hidden meaning. It's just not there.

TL;DR: The Blair Witch Project gets its magic from the cultural phenomenon, not what appears onscreen.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1359

Reviews In This Series

The Blair Witch Project (Myrick & Sanchez, 1999)

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Berlinger, 2000)

Blair Witch(Wingard, 2016)

Pregnancy Scares

Year: 2014

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

Cast: Allison Miller, Zach Gilford, Sam Anderson

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Alright, all you people complaining about how Devil's Due is a haphazard remake of Rosemary's Baby can stop balking now. It's clearly a haphazard remake of Paranormal Activity 2.

It's not even February yet and we're already into our second found footage release of 2014. Devil's Due, which will go down in history as the god-fearing meat between the bread of the two anemic Paranormal Activity movies they're throwing at us this year, was helmed by the filmmaking collective Radio Silence, the team behind "10/31/98," easily the best vignette in the 2012 found footage anthology V/H/S.

That vignette was largely forgettable (which is, ironically, why it stands out - every other part of the film was memorably atrocious), but was redeemed by a gonzo practical effects-filled ending that was predictable and unshocking but fun enough to avoid leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Clearly Radio Silence didn't want to mess with success and changed their formula not one iota for this found footage "whoops, the devil's in me" thriller.

This is what happens when you have sex without a condom - you get pregnant. Then die.

Devil's Due opens with a creepy shot of a stalker filming a sixteen-year-old girl and her friends through her living room window. When the friends leave, he sneaks up the trellis and into her bedroom, scaring her as she comes out of the shower. It turns out that the stalker is her fiancé coming to surprise her before the wedding and she's not actually a teenager at all, thus providing the first and only shocking twist in the entire film.

Sam (Allison Miller) and Zach (Zach Gilford) are madly in love - and Zach wants to use his new video camera to record all the stupid dumb moments of their wedding week that he never wants to forget. It's actually quite sweet. Unfortunately, from what we see of the tape, he records about seven seconds worth of footage a day, including the wedding and the first half of the honeymoon.

Once the takes get longer, you know something's going down and the couple's honeymoon in beautiful Santo Domingo is shortly derailed by a mysterious cabdriver (Roger Payano) taking them on a detour to an underground party (you'd think that the "hold on, let me unbolt these steel doors and take you into an underground catacomb in a foreign land" part would have turned them off, but darn are those young lovers intrepid). 

This might look like a mere wedding, but it's actually a fierce gauntlet of warriors.

The camera apparently turns itself on and off for several minutes and we capture glimpses of a mysterious cult ritual being performed on an unconscious Sam. Gosh, I wonder what could be happening?

Spoiler alert: She's pregnant. With the Antichrist.

It's really all just so much boilerplate, pulled evenly from the Found Footage and Unimmaculate Conception genres. There's secret cult symbols, creepy watchers, pregnancy complications, mysterious happenings, and plot holes galore. Although there are far fewer holes than in most movies of its ilk, Devil's Due still manages to be unraveled by "the police don't believe Zach's story even though he captured it all on tape and apparently forgot to show them" and "how could a college student and a recent graduate afford this house?"

He pays with kisses.

The movie's biggest flaw is its absolutely poisonous pacing. When the audience has seen it all before, that gives filmmakers a chance to subvert expectations or at least deliver what they want in an expedited manner, skipping over some of the more routine aspects of the genre. 

But Devil's Due insists that we watch an endless series of scenes of the couple's happy/blissfully unaware activities inconsistently punctuated by brief bursts of "ooh creepy" that aren't terribly composed, but simply aren't interesting enough for the massive amount of limp plot they're expected to drag along with them.

The good thing is that Gilford and Miller have a surprisingly sweet and unforced chemistry that renders them absolutely believable as young newlyweds. The acting is of a par rarely seen in found footage movies (largely because the producers chose actual actors instead of unknowns) and their little tics and tiny interactions make the roles absolutely fleshed out and lived in.

This is of massively powerful importance, because without these actors, there would be no reason to care about what the film is doing at all. As it stands, the characters are charmingly portrayed by likable actors with easy chemistry (somehow Zach's character isn't a douche - a welcome departure from a horror genre staple) and is largely enjoyable even if it's a not particularly scary horror flick.

Their conversations about kale are more fascinating than the cult ritual scenes. I'm being serious.

There's a few shock moments that land, like Father Thomas (Sam Anderson) ruining Zach's sister's first communion by leaking a veritable geyser of blood and the leadup to the finale, but the bulk of the horror in the film all exists in the ethereal realm of potential energy. There's a lot of moments that could be scary that mysteriously aren't. 

The most memorable of which is that when the cult sets up secret surveillance cameras inside the house (a bothersome detail considering that the compiled footage is supposedly from three entirely disparate groups who all have good reason to hide and protect it - who is "finding" these tapes and editing them together?), one camera is hung directly above the stairwell, peering down.

I told Sergio I would eat my hat if that shot wasn't used for some cool falling scene.

I can feel the brim poking my small intestine.

Let's ignore that too-vivid imagery by staring at these lovely fellows for ten seconds.

It's all predictable from the very first scene (in fact, it's predictable from the opening five seconds of the trailer), but it's certainly not the worst January horror movie ever released. It's mostly pleasant, which is more than I can say of the tripe that's being released in theaters lately.

My biggest problem with Devil's Due is this. Why this story again? Is there anything more compelling to say about the birth of the Antichrist? These films always end more or less immediately with its emergence from the womb (Not a spoiler. Come on.), but wouldn't it be way more interesting to see the aftermath?

Not that I'm asking for a Devil's Due 2, but wouldn't it be nice to have a film with stakes like "the end of the world as we know it" to actually depict the end of the world as we know it?

I'm just saying. When you think about it, the travails of one attractive couple don't quite compare.

But hey. At least it's not Texas Chainsaw 3D.

TL;DR: Devil's Due is never anything but boilerplate, but committed leading performances keep it at a high ebb despite bland scare sequences.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Although I enjoyed it, I'm gonna go with a firm no on this one.

Word Count: 1193