A Dreadful Decade (Part V): Lake Mungo (2008) dir. Joel Anderson

Logline: After the accidental drowning of their teenage daughter (Alice, portrayed by Talia Zucker), the surviving members of the Palmer family have trouble sorting out their collective grief. Their problems are exacerbated by the alleged appearances of Alice's ghost in their home and abroad. This pseudo-documentary seeks to determine the existence of Alice's spectral afterlife and uncover the lingering mysteries of her corporeal days, long buried in the sands of Australia's dried-out Lake Mungo.

Analysis: When we see Alice Palmer in old photographs and video footage, those taken both before and after her untimely demise, we can't shake the feeling that we're looking at a ghost. Perhaps, as the film hints, she was always a ghost, in one sense of the term. We learn over the course of the film that she has encountered her own ghost, has dreamed of her later life as a ghost, and has taken actions that she will later take again as a ghost. Alice Palmer haunts Lake Mungo. The appropriateness of the film's title and its reference to New South Wales' famous dry lake is manifold. At the film's climax, Alice encounters a specter of her future at the dead lake, only to later die in the active waters of another, different lake. Later, she is seen haunting the lake she died in, and yet she was already haunting the dry Lake Mungo while she was alive. Lake Mungo itself materializes within the film as a phantasm, as a visual monument to a place both dead and curiously alive, lingering on as a palpable presence and vacation spot. The temporal circularity of Lake Mungo leaves the dry lake and Alice stuck somewhere between life and death, existence and nonexistence. Lake Mungo laments the tragedy of such a fate, and one way to read the film is as an ode to those sad souls like Alice who can anticipate their own ends through the troubling way they lead their lives. Alice is haunted by her own ghosts: the knowledge that her actions are leading her swiftly towards death and her resignation over the fact that no one can help her, not even those closest to her.

But I think there's a far grimmer reading to be dredged from the bottom of Lake Mungo, one derived not from Alice's personal demons but from the gross negligence of her family in recognizing her trouble before (and after) it was too late. The Palmers loved Alice, certainly, but it's clear they never really possessed any awareness of what was going on in her life. They're ignorant of her fear of death, her use of psychic counseling, and her bizarre sexual affair with the next-door neighbors. We're told of the chilly relationship between Alice and her mother, June (Rosie Traynor), who could never manage to give herself fully to her daughter. After Alice's death, each member of her small family attempts to grieve in a different way: Roy (David Pledger), her father, distracts himself with his work; Mathew (Martin Sharpe), her brother, inexplicably forges fake evidence of her ghost's presence in the family home; and June steadfastly clings to the hope that Alice might not be dead at all. With the exception of Roy (who is eager to forget Alice entirely), the family's expressions of grief are based in the logic of guilt. They don't want Alice to be gone from their lives entirely, because if she is that means they've failed her in some way, and that June's fear that Alice will have died not knowing how much they loved her is fact. Thus, the family colludes to keep Alice alive, in one form or another, until they feel absolved of their own guilt over not being able to help her during her existential depression, of which they were clueless.

It's the act of uncovering Alice's secrets in the year that follows her death that makes her family think they've finally put her spirit to rest. The film's most melancholy and heart-wrenching horror is that they're wrong. In their desire to move on with their lives, the Palmers were distracted by the superficial revelations about Alice's troubled life and were thus unable to see that her deeper problem was her inability to seek solace and assistance within her distant family unit. During the film's denouement, a masterful montage of separate psychic meditation sessions with mother and daughter conducted a year apart about an unknowingly shared dream, we learn that Alice has been trying to communicate to her family her continued existence, to no avail. In the end, her family abandons her, moves to a new house free of her association. But perhaps they had already abandoned her, back when she was alive, sobbing with fright at the foot of her parents' bed but unable to bring herself to awaken them. The film's conclusion leaves Alice's family ignorantly, blissfully sleeping on, and Alice herself haunting empty hallways, alone, in death as in life.

Technical Merits: The effectiveness of Lake Mungo's documentary approach to horror storytelling goes a long way towards lending legitimacy to the documentary/found footage horror subgenre. The film's documentary form suits the material, allowing us to glimpse Alice Palmer only through ghostly family videos and photographs, in which her vibrant life is captured in flat, lifeless celluloid and digital pixels. The documentary form allows writer/director Joel Anderson to keep Alice and her mystery at a distance from us, but it also enables him to slowly unravel a lot of the plot's big revelations in a way that feels organic to the constructed nature of a documentary, and which would probably feel cheap or unearned in a traditionally shot horror feature. Watching Lake Mungo, we're always aware that we're in the hands of a skilled documentarian who wishes to lead us gently from one mystery to the next, with the film's sheen of faux-reality making us feel (however fleetingly) like collaborators, following the leads placed before us. As if we're watching a segment on Unsolved Mysteries, and right before the commercial break we'll be flashed the phone number for the tip hotline.

Much of the film's success as a faux-documentary can be attributed to that fact that it's wonderfully shot and edited, with a keen awareness of the proper balance of static talking-head interviews, moody scenery and location shots, and amateur found footage. Like the best actual documentaries, the screen is subtly kinetic and layered, with the assembled images providing for the viewer a narrative beyond the information given through interview and observation. For the sticklers out there, you could easily (and cruelly) convince a fellow viewer that it was a real documentary (I have!), as it only very rarely stretches credibility or verisimilitude. (The only obvious flaw in this aspect of the film is the repeated occurrence of random folks around town discovering important-to-the-narrative images/figures/ghosts in their barely discernible amateur-recorded video footage. A bizarre, unnecessary form of crowdsourcing, we might say.)

Relevance: If the television series Twin Peaks (and its prequel film, Fire Walk with Me [1992]) had been filmed as a faux-documentary and lost all of its oddball humor, it would look a lot like Lake Mungo. Of course, there's no murder mystery acting as Lake Mungo's narrative backbone like in Twin Peaks, but otherwise the similarities are pertinent: a beautiful, locally adored teenage girl (also with the surname "Palmer." Imagine that...) dies tragically, her family's grief affects the whole town, a mystery (of a sort) is unraveled as the characters discover the seedy secret life of the dead girl, and eventually all gives way to a creepy, half-decipherable supernatural world. This affinity for the intrigue and narrative twists of Twin Peaks-inspired dead teen girl mysteries is actually a partial detriment to Lake Mungo, though not a fatal one. All of the focus placed upon Alice's secrets and hidden quasi-bad girl persona distract from what is, at its core, one of the most emotionally despondent horror films out there. The film drowns itself in sadness, and yet it's no less frightening for its embrace of that emotional tether. Lake Mungo is far from the first film to try to make us feel sympathy for a scary ghost, but it's one of the best at making us realize the crushing, inescapable humanity of those storied chain-rattlers.

ESSAY: The Sacrament (2014), Willow Creek (2014), & the Shape of Found Footage Horror to Come

Abstract: An essay on the current state of the found footage subgenre of horror. Prognosis: Fatal, probably, but that death nerve keeps on twitching. An examination, in particular, of two recent and once-promising FF films (The Sacrament [2014] and Willow Creek [2014]) that fail to add much new to the subgenre while basing their approaches to the form in those of a couple of films over a decade old. The found footage movement appears stagnant, but does any opportunity for advancement or maturation remain? There are slow-burning glimmers of hope.

This essay features discussion of:

The Sacrament (2014) dir. Ti West

Zero Day (2003) dir. Ben Coccio

Willow Creek (2014) dir. Bobcat Goldthwait

The Blair Witch Project (1999) dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick

Back in 2012, after the release of the non-FF but sneakingly like and advertised-as FF horror film Chernobyl Diaries (2012), I predicted that as found footage horror films began to fall from favor, as Hollywood studios and independents alike began to realize that the success of Paranormal Activity (2009) was not quite as repeatable as they'd hoped (even for further Paranormal Activity films), what we'd begin to see was something akin to osmosis. Screened alongside mainstream fluff at the multiplexes for long enough, found footage horror would begin to rub off on its more traditionally filmed peers to the extent that the two would soon become indistinguishable, I imagined. The handheld, documentary style would pop up in films that weren't intended as faux-documentaries, and the emphasis on "character" and "narrative" in traditional horror would evolve into an emphasis on the audience's "experience" of the audible and visual horror. I will pat myself on the back for this one: the fingerprint of the found footage movement is omnipresent as of 2014. You'd have a smaller list by simply noting those films that don't in some way utilize the found footage aesthetic, but for the sake of supporting my claim here's a collection of relevant films that do: Sinister (2012), The Conjuring (2013), The Banshee Chapter (2013), Lovely Molly (2012), The Apparition (2012), Oculus (2014), The Purge (2013), The Quiet Ones (2014). None of these films could reasonably be classified as a found footage horror film, and yet each either contains sections that utilize the FF aesthetic or are traditional horror movies filmed in an FF-reminiscent style.

So my glimpse into the crystal ball of horror cinema's future proved me correct that once, but could I manage a repeat performance of foreseeing? Later in 2012, while fuming over the detritus released to the general public under the working title of The Devil Inside (2012), I posited that all of the creative potential in the unadulterated FF form hadn't been evacuated quite yet, and I was certain that those storytelling champions of the subgenre were riding their horses into view from off on the horizon. Any second now, they'd be here, and found footage horror would find its redemption in the public's eye through their efforts.

I'll admit that I was maybe less of an oracle on this matter. The last two years of found footage films, both major and minor, have been pretty much what I had hoped they wouldn't be: hours upon hours of paranormal investigation or Satanic happening found footage with ambitions stretching no farther than "BOO!" As the gap between consumer and professional digital video fast closes, another sort of osmosis is happening in the realm of budget horror cinema, in which narrative inspiration seems to be derived from supernatural Youtube Gotcha! videos with the highest number of views. The creative bankruptcy of the majority of FF films being produced and released at this moment signals that the subgenre is undoubtedly at its lowest point.

Yet, I wasn't entirely foolhardy in my prediction. In the last few years, a handful of genuine filmmakers have indeed seen the value of the non-traditional found footage form in communicating their stories on screen and thus have produced found footage films of their own. For instance, Barry Levinson (The Bay [2012]) , Renny Harlin (Devil's Pass [2013]), and Bernard Rose (Sxtape [2013]) have all directed found footage horror films within the last two years. Sure, those three aren't exactly visionary filmmakers (as each of their FF films indicate), and, moreover, their embrace of the FF form might be rooted in practicality (promising an FF film's budget might be the only way these relative old-timers can find work within the ever-youthful genre), but the point stands. Filmmakers raised and practiced on traditionally filmed cinema are turning toward the found footage form for some reason or another. Notably, this year saw the limited releases of two promising found footage films from two very different but equally legitimate directors: The Sacrament, directed by Ti West (The Innkeepers [2011], The House of the Devil [2009]), and Willow Creek, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait (God Bless America [2011], World's Greatest Dad [2009]). Perhaps, I imagined, these bonafide filmmakers, whose previous features I find to be both intelligently and artfully crafted, would indeed be the subgenre's ghoulishly pallid white knights, rescuing it from the clutches of insipidness.

My imagination was a bit too romantic. The Sacrament and Willow Creek are both fine films, and in style and execution are among the most satisfying the found footage crop has produced in the past few years. Yet, while watching them, I couldn't shake the vague sense of disappointment that comes with reliving a once-fond experience after years spent apart and finding it somehow diluted, cheapened in the interim. Against my hopes, the majority of what these two films bring to the subgenre is a rehash of what had already come before, over a decade earlier, in a pair of superior films (namely, Zero Day [2003] and The Blair Witch Project [1999]). Despite the best efforts of these talented artists, the subgenre in their hands remains a set of carnival rides eroded with age and held together with rubber bands.

Allow me to explain:

First, there's Ti West's The Sacrament. Heading into it, I held an unreasonable amount of hope for this one. I felt the subgenre needed a savior, and who could be better equipped to accomplish this salvaging than one of our best contemporary horror filmmakers? I nearly peed myself in anticipation when I found out West was making an FF film. Sure, his first effort in the subgenre (the "Second Honeymoon" segment from the FF anthology V/H/S [2012]) wasn't revelatory, but it was the shining pearl of relative intelligence and creativity in that turd pile. I hoped that a full-length effort, unencumbered by the anthology format, might prove even stronger. But The Sacrament is a disappointment. It's been accused of being a slavish faux-reproduction of the Jonestown Massacre, and that it is, but that fact alone doesn't make it a wasted effort. The Jonestown Massacre is a bizarre and perplexing event in American history that no number of talking head documentaries can suffice to make total sense out of. Thus, The Sacrament poised itself to be an enlightening, if fictional, dramatization of events that could attempt to explain, on some level, the damaged human minds that caused it.

It's at this point that I'm reminded of Ben Coccio's faux-Columbine shooting found footage film, Zero Day. What that film and The Sacrament have in common is the use of the found footage form to bring immediacy to a historical tragedy, to allow our camera eye to witness the events firsthand without the glossy layers of Hollywood filmmaking separating us from the very real (if, again, slightly fictionalized) carnage. But, in contrast to Zero Day, The Sacrament doesn't succeed in this goal of making real the horrifying unreality of the actual events. Being a "Horror Film" first and foremost, The Sacrament keeps its cult members frightening and alien to us, and thus we're never presented with the opportunity to know or understand them. We are made to become firsthand witnesses to the events, but we leave them knowing no more about why they happened then those real-life viewers watching television news reports of the Jonestown Massacre's aftermath. It's a problem of perspective: Zero Day utilized the found footage form as a video diary of its Columbine-esque killers, and we, aligned with them as viewers, were encouraged to identify with them and their deeds. The film doesn't justify the actions of its teen murderers, but it allows us to, on a human level, understand a bit more about these killers (both real and imagined) beyond the sneering villain yearbook photos burned into our brains. The Sacrament, released a decade after Zero Day, neglects to forcefully provide us that human identification, and thus its use of this particular history-pilfering form fails. By the close of the film, we know nothing about the motivation of Gene Jones's supernaturally charismatic Father, nor do we truly understand what it took for his many followers to blindly live and die by his dictates, against their better sense and reason. The Sacrament strives to be a Creepy Cult Found Footage movie, not a Chilling Investigation of the Human Condition and Mass Suicide, and thus reeks more of "exploitation" than "examination." This observation doesn't render The Sacrament's most powerful scenes, like the inevitable Kool-Aid guzzling, any less visceral, but it does make them feel significantly more hollow.

And if the connection between The Sacrament and Zero Day feels more spiritual than direct to you in this argument about found footage's inability to advance, then consider Bobcat Goldthwait's found footage Bigfoot hunt, Willow Creek. Before Willow Creek, Goldthwait had never made a  horror film. Regardless, it was difficult for me not to be intrigued by the prospect of what he could bring to the subgenre. His previous, darkly comedic features proved to be winning satires with a keen eye focused upon the shallowness of our current media. Could Willow Creek enact a similar critique, perhaps with that keen eye focused on the innumerable Bigfoot Hunter or Paranormal Investigator "reality" television programs littering the broadcast schedule? Somewhat unfortunately, Willow Creek is a straight-up Bigfoot hunt found footage flick. Bigfoot FF is some of the worst out there at the moment (beaten for the title only by Abandoned Asylum Ghost Hunter FF), so as this realization about the film's intentions dawned on me about a third of the way through my viewing of Willow Creek, I feared for the worst. Fortunately, Willow Creek's steadfast return to the basics of the found footage form reveals the lingering potency of the subgenre's style.

But, simultaneously, Willow Creek reveals the subgenre's unwillingness to move that style forward. As a Supernatural Documentary Gone Awry FF, Willow Creek follows, beat-for-beat, the exact structure of the subgenre's chief progenitor, The Blair Witch Project. As in The Blair Witch Project, we witness the intrepid protagonists of Willow Creek preparing for their documentary shoot, filming introductory footage, entering the relevant town and interviewing the locals, heading to a famous local spot and filming more footage, camping out and being relentlessly terrorized at night while in a tent, getting lost in the woods, and perishing in an enigmatic ending in which much camera-whirling carnage is had and a vague callback from earlier is made. Goldthwait's film is not as succinct as The Blair Witch Project (the townie interview section of Willow Creek drags on far too long), but despite sharing an identical structure, the film doesn't prove grating. While more ramshackle and amateurish than I would have banked on, the film features amiable performances and enough suspense to justify its existence. But still, the question must be begged: is aping (pun intended) another decade-plus-old entry in the subgenre the best that a legitimate filmmaker can muster in 2014? Does such an obvious purloining of previous source material (however effective in isolation) herald the death knell of found footage? Has the shaky well run dry?

I'm still unsure. Considering The Sacrament and Willow Creek in retrospect, I realize that each film's most effective scene provides something to the viewer that traditionally filmed narratives would be extremely reluctant to and that most FF films of yesteryear would also most likely shy away from in their push toward kinetic, nausea-inducing camera movement: the extended stillness of frame. We see this in The Sacrament's horrific stationary long shot of the force-injection of cyanide between once-loving family members. We see it in Willow Creek's remarkable, nearly 20-minute-long tent-entrenched long take. (Actress Alexie Gilmore's face throughout this shot is the film's MVP). These shots may not be new uses of the form (even each of Paranormal Activity films makes occasional use of the camera that lingers), but they're by far the most prolonged and effective uses of a stationary camera that I've seen in the subgenre. Each of these scenes (though brief when considered in the larger running time) remind us of FF's effectiveness as a form, of the squirm-inducing splendor of the camera that won't flinch, and of the filmmaker whose presence is felt only through an absence of interference, who refuses to give us relief through a cut to quieter pastures and instead leaves us as helpless as a camera dropped to the ground. Moving forward, I hope the FF movement embraces this stillness of stationary horror. Let the cameras fall-- and remain-- where they may.

WNUF Halloween Special (2013) dir. Chris LaMartina

Logline: Halloween, 1987: Local television station WNUF sent a field reporter and a team of experts into the abandoned Webber House, site of the horrific Spirit Board Murders several decades prior, to broadcast a live television special that would confirm or put to rest the ceaseless rumors of the house's alleged haunting. The reporter and his team were never seen again. The television special presented to you is exactly what hit the airwaves on 10/31/1987, unedited and salvaged from the recycling bin of time.

A nostalgia project with an uncommon quaintness in its approach to reconstructing wistful approximations of yesteryear, the WNUF Halloween Special is also an aesthetic artifact of a cultural practice that's been lost to lossless encodes and streaming media in the cloud: the film is (at the moment) only available as a limited edition VHS tape, scribbled on with a felt tip marker and then shoved into an unadorned sleeve, as if it had been recorded off the television screen by a fellow discerning viewer as it aired and then exchanged discretely among like-minded friends or mailed to your doorstep through the machinations of some illicit underground bootleg service. Degraded, snowed-out magnetic tape recordings of television broadcasts (be they movies, television programs, marathons, or specials) were, for those of us who were children in the years before commercial home video became an affordable obsession, the stuff we were weaned on. Perhaps the most admirable quality of Chris LaMartina's faux found footage film is its devotion to recreating that singular viewing experience, annoyances and all, down to the commercial interruptions every couple minutes, irritating station call letter jingles, and that ad for the carpet warehouse that seems to never stop running. Considering the fact that these commercials make up the bulk of the film's length, it's to the filmmakers' credit that they're never a chore to watch and that-- barring a few promos for obviously nonexistent syndicated '80s TV series-- they rarely violate the appearance of verisimilitude. (Having fed her the phony story of the special's history and left off the fact of its more recent vintage, my partner discerned that the bloody special itself was staged but failed to suspect that it wasn't a genuine article of 1980s television.) 

Necessarily, the plot of the WNUF Halloween Special is secondary to the experience itself. As the tape rolls, we're greeted at first by a pair of cloyingly bubbly news anchors in costume on that specialist of days in 1987. This insipid, charmingly hokey duo introduce a few local interest pieces with holiday twists (like that of a local dentist who's running a candy buyback program) while teasing the start of the titular WNUF Halloween Special, which will see brash reporter Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf) and a team of paranormal investigators enter an allegedly haunted house in the hope of discovering the truth about its ghostly rumors. (An inspiration for LaMartina and his collaborators may have been the excellent Morton Downey Jr.-starring episode of Tales from the Crypt, "Television Terror," which bears a remarkably similar plot and also partially employs the found footage medium to tell its tale.) WNUF doesn't work as a film, but why should it? Was your town's local holiday news special ever worthy of the multiplexes? The moments in the film that most find their mark are those in which the ornery Frank Stewart interviews the assembled costumed audience for some unintentionally awkward local flavor. It feels trite to say, but WNUF succeeds in reminding us of, if not a simpler time, a slightly more innocent time in American history, when-- as various pretend commercials remind us-- we encouraged grown men to be big buddies to small boys, the Twins Towers still stood, and the biggest evil that the religious right saw itself fit to combat was the pagan ritual of one dark night in October. It's Ghostwatch (1992) for us Yanks, but-- unlike that artfully executed primetime ruse-- it's less attempting to play a trick on us than it is reassuring us that it loves our childhood, too.

June 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of June, 2013.

V/H/S/2 (2013) dir. Eduardo Sánchez, Adam Wingard, Gareth Huw Evans, et al.

The loathing at the foundation of my being that I felt for the first film in the V/H/S anthology series was generated by three salient facts about its production: 1) the repugnant "ironic" misogynism derived from its meathead fraternity party tone, 2) its lack of interest in the found footage genre as anything but a cheap delivery system for "BOO!s," and 3) a disinterest in employing the horror anthology format to create a coherent world for its stories. Sadly, my complaints matter very little to anyone, and V/H/S was a resounding financial success on VOD and home video, especially considering its scrappy roots, and thus a fast-tracked sequel was greenlit soon after its general release. The infernal spawn of this newly fledged series, V/H/S/2, featuring a new crop of established horror directors trying their hands at the shaky cam, is embarrassingly bad.

All of my complaints about the original are present here, supplemented with some new ones. As a found footage film, it hardly registers as attempting a semblance of verisimilitude. We find tapes edited together from multiple cameras, nonstop lazy fantasy camera gimmicks, non-diegetic scores and Inception foghorns, and the requisite post-production camera malfunctions. Like that of the previous film, Simon Barrett's wraparound story makes no attempt to connect the individual stories into a larger fictional world (which appears to now contain winged demons, zombies, aliens, ghosts, and a goat-headed Antichrist) or explore the origins or purpose of the bizarre underground VHS tape fetishism club that is the film's flimsy conceit. The existence of these perfunctory wraparound stories in the V/H/S films is a head-scratcher. If the filmmakers don't care about developing a unified world for these short films, why bother with including this weak connective tissue? Why not simply present them as a collection of short films? The only conceivable answer is that the filmmakers wish to include a believable, realistic narrative framework to explain how the audience is seeing the shorts, but this effort is made to seem ludicrous when contrasted against the films' copious technical  dismissals of logic and reality. Otherwise, the wraparounds simply provide more opportunities for between-story cutaways to quick shots of figures lurking in the background, and that's always a plus, right? Right? As is the case with the initial film, if this is not an entirely cynical appeal to the lowest common denominator's wallets then I am extremely depressed.

The shorts in brief: Adam Wingard's "Clinical Trials" displays the same oafishness as his contribution to the last film, including-- as it does-- the suggestion that ghost attacks can be prevented by having sex with a nude woman while a literal voyeuristic male camera eye watches the action. How did this man also make the wonderful A Horrible Way to Die (2010)? Eduardo Sánchez, fresh off the fantastic Lovely Molly (2012), takes a huge step backwards in his subgenre efforts with his short "A Ride in the Park," which is an only partly clever concept stranded without a story (and half of that concept is swiped-- almost certainly unintentionally-- from the insufferable Last Ride (2011)). Jason Eisener's short "Alien Abduction Slumber Party" is an obnoxious riff on Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County (1998) with trying-too-hard dog-splatter shock value. I'll give a hesitant seal of approval to Gareth Huw Evans's section, "Safe Haven," which contains an ounce of narrative and is at least amusing in its nonsensical mayhem, but it's clear that this short (already the film's longest by a good margin) could have benefited from the fleshing out that a full-length feature could provide.

As a whole, this is the worst sort of creatively barren dreck. It closes with a shotgun-blasted tongue wagging, a thumbs up, and a split-second frame showcasing some bare breasts. Bravo. I'm being harsh about this film and its makers but that's because there's some (seemingly) talented people behind it and their efforts are no more complex than a Youtube "REAL GHOST" video with mediocre production values. The FF mode of storytelling fascinates me because of its potential for subtlety and unique storytelling possibilities, but more and more often lately it's being used (and abused) by hack filmmakers to create so-called "visceral experiences" that are so calculated, phony, and devoid of story that it prevents any sort of immersion within the cinematic world. And being that immersion is what these filmmakers seem to want to accomplish with the aesthetic, what's the fucking point if you ignore reality and narrative coherency for the sake of convenience and lazy thrills? I don't think the people behind this movie are stupid, so my only guess is that they don't care. They see (correctly, unfortunately) that teenagers and indiscriminate horror fans flock to low-budget, low-effort FF films with copious jump scares, so they set out to make some (quickly, cheaply) in that mold. I think the V/H/S films are a high profile demonstration of how allowing FF to become pure aesthetic rather than a mode in which to tell a story produces nothing of any value. Anthology horror films, by their nature, can often be slight, but this thing is non-existent.

Hatchet III (2013) dir. BJ McDonnell

Imagine if the opening scene of Jason Goes to Hell (1993) had been stretched out into two feature length films. Now crawl into a ball and begin muttering to yourself while swatting imaginary flies wearing "Hatchet Army" t-shirts. Adam Green has done well for himself against the odds, establishing (on the strength of really only one film and a tacky seasonal online short) a coterie of genre fans who salivate over his work and defend it with passion. This adoration has elevated him to the status of a bonafide genre personality (he co-stars in a sitcom about himself, for Gozer's sake!) and his chief creation, the ghostly disfigured hillbilly Victor Crowley, into the pantheon of iconic indestructible slasher baddies. It's important to note how remarkable an achievement this is, regardless of the quality of the films that Green has had a hand in. There are three Hatchet movies. How did this happen, especially after the critical, financial, and PR disaster that was Hatchet II (2010)? Scott Glosserman tried to create a new franchise villain for the genre the year before Green with his superior film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and has unequivocally failed, so such a task appears downright herculean in the post-'80s horror landscape. And yet Hatchet is now a trilogy. 

The initial Hatchet is a fun enough film, and though it's steeped in juvenile humor it also manages to overcome those groans and become (on occasion) genuinely frightening, primarily due to our uneasiness over the hulking Crowley and his abilities. Hatchet II finds the navigation between humor and horror more arduous: misogynist "jokes" dominate and the practical gore is played exclusively for "laughs." Worse, we're shown too much concerning Victor Crowley's convoluted background, which demystifies this spectral baddie while trying to make us sympathetic to his plight. Hatchet II was not well received outside of Green's core fan base, and the unrated film was pulled from the several dozen cinemas it was playing in after only a few days. Perhaps the experience of that sequel soured Green from taking directing duties on this third chapter, though he remains on staff as writer and executive producer. (However, Green clearly has a sense of humor about himself: he cameos in Hatchet III for one brief shot as a man in the Sheriff's drunk tank who gives an offended look when the Sheriff (Zach Galligan), after being told the events of the previous two films, comments that the yarn is the stupidest he's ever heard.) 

Hatchet III is directed by Green's cameraman from the two previous films, though this passing of the reins makes very little difference: this is every bit what you'd expect of a second Hatchet sequel, if not somewhat less than. It lazily repeats the "mercenaries hunting down Crowley" story from Part II and does nothing else with it. The film even continues to take place on the very same night as the other two, as if the filmmakers are incapable of evolving their story out of familiar swamps, or perhaps hesitant to experiment with their barely-there formula and risk not giving those Hatchet Army standard bearers exactly what they want. Consequently, the film is littered with dumb jokes, excessive gore (of which some is bolstered with cheap computer VFX, effectively tarnishing the series' self-avowed practical effects cred), and too many glimpses of its invulnerable villain, who is less an agent of fear than a walking threshing machine. Seeing a welcome  yet bulkier Zach Galligan struggle through a Louisiana accent isn't enough of a draw to make the endeavor a worthwhile one. This, like its predecessor, is DTV garbage. The fact that-- technically-- it's not is one to admire, but I don't have to be happy about it.

Pacific Heights (1990) dir. John Schlesinger

Pacific Heights, John Schelesinger's high anxiety thriller about the horrors of financial responsibility and the sociopathic viciousness of those aspiring to maintain personal wealth, is one of the finest horror films of the 1990s. It's that almost unheard of thriller that manages to set its audience to squirming without resorting to egregious shock tactics. Rather, it taps into the subconscious nightmare of anyone who has ever had a monster for a landlord or tenant. Michael Keaton's sparse but perfect performance as the tenant from hell is effective because of his absent presence: he's the unseen monster making ceaseless noise behind the locked door. Worse, he's the monster with the legal right to be there. Although Pacific Heights seems to me to be pointedly critical of the desire for upward mobility, the foremost charge levied against the film is that it's a horror film for yuppies. But so what? I can't think of anything scarier than being a yuppie. 

Meltdown 07: Found Footage Rewind (Part VII)

  The Bay (2012) dir. Barry Levinson

For competent directors, populist horror trends tend to serve as the launching points for Hollywood careers, allowing these filmmakers to prove themselves capable of wrangling a successful product out of an easy formula while under the constraints of a limited budget. Not totally screwing up-- or, even better, displaying a bit of creativity-- in these early genre projects can open up some significant studio doors for aspiring filmmakers. (See, for instance, the careers of most of the young directors who first worked making horror films for Roger Corman (and then went on to become people with names like "Coppola" and "Bogdanovich") or, more specifically to the topic in question, gander at the upcoming projects of successful FF directors like Chronicle's Josh Trank and Paranormal Activity's Oren Peli.) With this in mind, it's curious to see a horror trend like FF being used as a shelter for a faltering career instead. Academy Award-winning director Barry Levinson (he of Diner (1982), Rain Man (1988), and Wag the Dog (1997)) has had a rough past decade in multiplexes, and after a few successful TV projects we find him returning to feature films with The Bay, a modest FF/mockumentary horror that in many crucial ways is indistinguishable from other modern efforts in the subgenre made by less seasoned filmmakers. That isn't necessarily a dig at Levinson's skills, as it's actually quite impressive to witness how seamlessly he integrates The Bay into the FF movement's current trends and aesthetics, but-- simultaneously-- it's also disappointing to see how little his four decades of experience behind the camera adds to the film. While in many way an enjoyable film, The Bay still suffers from the same tried and true deficiencies that so many other FF films are afflicted with: terrible amateur acting, preposterous plot points, and themes with the subtlety of wrecking balls.

Like so many animal terror movies, The Bay positions itself as an ecologically conscious critique of the level of pollutants we allow into our environment by demonstrating the effects of an exaggerated consequence (in this case, the appearance of a freakishly large, water-based, tongue-eating mutant parasite, the Cymothoa exigua, in the eponymous polluted zone). Yet, more so than nearly any animal terror film, The Bay appears to fancy itself a totally earnest and, in essence, truthful ecological tract against the abuses of industry, using its horror elements merely as visceral support for its claims (rather than the usual track these films take: legitimizing the horror with an ecological context). This might have been a successful track to take if the film were more thoughtful and accurate than the alarmist fairytale it is, depicting, as it does, a comically evil mayor who colludes to pollute the town's water for profit (and then attempts to prevent panic when townsfolk start becoming infected: another animal terror film trope) and a wildly incompetent and disinterested CDC who really can't be bothered to deal with the alleged "outbreak" in some small town in Maryland. Regardless, the infrequent bits of horror that the film includes are admirably done, and the film's conceptual mutant critters are so squirm-inducing that it would have to try pretty hard to screw them up (it doesn't). In terms of its aesthetic approach to FF, the film is also of interest for its higher-than-average number of footage sources, including that from TV news crews, Skype sessions, FaceTime chats, home videos, scientific research video logs, and police cruiser dashboard cams. How all of this government-suppressed footage of The Bay's disaster winds up in the hands of an amateur-in-every-respect reporter (as seen in the film's wraparound segments) is unclear because the film has no good answer for its conceits, but the variety is appreciated nonetheless.

 

Area 407 (2012) dir. Dale Fabrigar & Everette Wallin

One could suppose that if a person has no other frame of reference, Area 407 might resemble a movie. But that might also be stretching it. Rather, it more closely resembles a belabored string of arguments and reaction shots captured through the lens of a camcorder, sprinkled with ADR'd noises off in the distance and the occasional blurry clipart velociraptor being dragged across an open window. Area 407 is sort of like the pilot episode of LOST, if it were set on New Year's Eve, if the plane had crashed in a field in California rather than an island, and if the shaking trees had indeed turned out to be dinosaurs rather than a mopey smoke monster. It's a poor enough excuse for an FF film (there's no motion towards an explanation regarding how we're seeing this footage (and if we have only the last shot to go on, it was swallowed by a dinosaur); the C.O. more often aims her camera at the faces of other characters when a dinosaur is howling away in the woods directly behind her), so what's even worse is that it can't manage to be at all interesting on any other level. The dinosaurs, which even in a bad movie would be reason enough to power through it, are obscured until a brief final shot (the very expensive camera conveniently malfunctions during all previous attacks), so what else could there even be to latch onto here? A big nil. If two things can be said in Area 407's defense they would be that the majority of the acting is not atrocious and the arguing-- though taking up an unfortunate amount of the running time-- is at least convincingly derived from a stressful and dangerous situation. Yes, the actors who run away from a CGI velociraptor's tail don't embarrass themselves too much. Would they like a noisemaker or a glittery party hat for their trouble?

 

The Dinosaur Project (2012) dir. Sid Bennett

I'd like to think that the directors of Area 407, Dale Fabrigar and Everette Wallin, tucked their velociraptor tails between their legs in shame after seeing The Dinosaur Project, released in the same year as their negligible dinosaur FF film and in every way surpassing it. Granted, the folks behind The Dinosaur Project obviously had a bigger pot of funds to pull from (we actually see dinosaurs!) and there's no denying that the film is aided by some gorgeous, if geographically confusing, location shooting in South Africa. But the film also bothers to anchor its story by establishing a believable central relationship between its estranged father and son protagonists, and the mere effort (so often lacking in FF films of this sort) convinces us to connect to it on a basic level. Moreover, the film cultivates a sense of wondrous adventure commingled with very real terror, resembling a sort of contemporary version of  Doyle's The Lost World and leaving the film feeling more fun than horrifying, much like the similarly successful Chronicle (2012). Also much like Chronicle, with its mind-controlled floating cameras, The Dinosaur Project attempts some snazzy innovation of the FF aesthetic (by way of zooming velcro micro-cameras and a dino neck collar cam) while at the same time pushing or ignoring the boundaries of camera coverage verisimilitude. But small chinks in the armor of the film's FF conceit are not enough to fell the whole. If nothing else proves the film's good intent, witness its denouement, which both satisfyingly hints at the further adventures its protagonist will have in dinoland and actively avoids the easy set up for a sequel by literally dismantling the camera. Much appreciated. Director Sid Bennett is responsible for another FF oddity, the recent Discovery Channel mockumentary Mermaids: The Body Found (2011), and if The Dinosaur Project represents his desire to continue playing around with the form, then let him at it.

The Frankenstein Theory (2013) dir. Andrew Weiner

Andrew Weiner's The Frankenstein Theory is one of the first major FF releases of the calendar year, and if we were to anticipate the rest of 2013 in FF on it alone then the prognosis wouldn't be entirely grim. Conceptually, the film is near ingenious, positing that Mary Shelley's novel was based, in fact, not on then current Romantic-era scientific conjecture but on an actual story of a scientist, here a Dr. Venkenheim, who reanimated a hulking corpse in his spare time to disastrous results. The discovery of this long-buried truth inspires a descendent of Venkenheim to hire a film crew to accompany him on a journey to the Arctic to substantiate reports of the Creature's continued existence. With this focus, the film aims for some literary cachet (there's a passing mention of a Justine-like character who is hanged for the Creature's crimes, and the tireless Arctic quest of the descendent of Dr. Venkenheim and his film crew's threats of mutiny echo the foolhardy pursuit of the novel's Walton) but one can't escape the feeling that the writers were working off the CliffsNotes (the Creature is a lumbering, wordless beast who eats meat, huh?). Still, the effort spent carving out some light themes and literary allusions is welcome, considering the rest of what's here is, at best, middling. For much of the film, little happens, and we're treated to a wealth of landscape beauty shots as our characters traverse the winter wasteland (plus, whoever edited together this-- again-- miraculously recovered footage was kind enough to splice in a few establishing shots). 

Besides a predominance of tedium until the final act, the film's most obvious issue is its deliberate avoidance of FF verisimilitude. Sure, the FF conceit of a film like The Dinosaur Project has a few holes, but The Frankenstein Theory's is a gulch. For awhile, the viewer may not realize that there is a cameraman, as he makes not a peep for most of the duration (there are, in fact, two camera operators at certain points, only adding to the confusion). But the primary C.O.'s professional silence makes the FF aesthetic feel abnormally artificial in the film, as if the filmmakers wanted to make their scenes more "cinematic" by removing the human operator while still having the film broadly conform to the FF trend. What this results in is the camera cutting to different shots and camera angles within a single scene that would be impossible with the crew's established documentary camera setup (and again raise questions about our mysterious footage editor). I noticed at least one glaring instance in which the camera jumped from in front of two characters to behind them without any passage of time or a cameraman visible in either shot, but I recall smaller bits of camera confusion as well (like a plethora of scenes featuring inexplicable shot-reverse-shot editing). Why bother creating an FF film, with all the form's inherent limitations, if you've decided to violate those very limitations for ease and convenience of storytelling? The only occasions in which the filmmakers use the aesthetics of FF are when they desire to obscure the Creature from our view during attacks, which always feel like a cheap shot in these sort of affairs to begin with, but are doubly unearned here in a film that wouldn't otherwise hesitate to cut to clearer footage from some other magical floating camera. Perhaps it's a small quibble, but it seems to be one that matters as FF films shift ever closer to resembling traditionally filmed cinema and begin to lose their unique spark. The Frankenstein Theory isn't the only offender on this count, and probably won't be the last. And, even then, the film redeems its transgressions in its enjoyable final act, in which the Creature plays a game of Occupy Yurt and meets (the descendant of) his maker. This conclusion presents a clever play on the novel's depiction of the Creature's desires, acting as a sort of wish fulfillment for the poor guy and (perhaps unintentionally) laying the foundation for a sequel I wouldn't mind seeing. Let us patiently await Bride of Frankenstein Theory.

Meltdown 07: Found Footage Rewind (Part VI)

Noroi: The Curse (2005) dir. Kôji Shiraishi

With (as far as my language-barrier-ed research tells me) at least five mockumentary/found footage films to his name (and three of them in the horror genre), Japanese director Kôji Shiraishi clearly has a certain fondness for the storytelling potential that the format provides, and-- unlike far too many of his peers-- he employs this verite aesthetic to his films in service of the story, rather than constructing a thin scenario to bridge together the handheld frights. This effort is appreciated. The first of his documentary horror films, Noroi: The Curse, was produced in 2005, five years after the initial burst of post-Blair Witch found footage imitators and a few years before the subgenre would rear its head once again. This timing results in the film positioning itself apart from the general trends of either movement and developing its own unique style and concerns (style and concerns that are also markedly distinct from the concurrent and overly flashy J-horror trend, while still drawing inspiration from Japanese folklore). Sure, parts of the film (especially a climactic forest encounter with a sinister force) are reminiscent of The Blair Witch, but not in a manner that feels like a cynical swipe. Rather, those moments only add up to one spooky strand in the complicated web of horrors that the film weaves: other strands include ghosts, possessed women, children with ESP, a tinfoil-hatted psychic, ectoplasmic worms, village sorcerers, ancient demon-pacifying rituals, suicidal birds, and abducted aborted embryos. The fact that Shiraishi is able to reconcile these disparate horror elements into a provocative and ultimately cohesive mystery narrative is miraculous. Furthermore, the fact that he and his cast and crew were able to accomplish the telling of such a coherent story while presenting it through the mediation of multiple forms of found footage is all the more impressive: here we have a film cobbled together from multiple documentaries, TV chat shows, home movies, photographs, and nighttime observation videos, and yet the transitions between them never feel jarring or unnecessarily showy. The position the audience is placed in is akin to that of the fictional documentarian, who immerses himself in the copious data and research surrounding the central puzzle, slowly piecing together the wild and (seemingly) contradictory elements into a unified image of horror. Though Noroi's story is both complex and engaging, it lacks the depth that those films in the subgenre's top tier possess. Consistently tangible throughout the film is the odd tension that exists between the modern technological world and the traditional world of demons and ghosts (and the eerie control that the latter has over the former), but Noroi neglects to make any clear statement regarding the enduring existence of its varied phenomena. Regardless, moments in the film-- particularly the aforementioned forest apparition at the climax-- are among the most unnerving the subgenre has yet produced, and that's worth something.

Occult (Okaruto) (2009) dir. Kôji Shiraishi

A few years later, as found footage was reemerging as horror's aesthetic of choice, Shiraishi released his second documentary horror, Occult. Somewhat disappointingly, Occult uses the same basic approach to the FF genre as Noroi does, with its "Documentary Filmmaker Explores an Occult Mystery Involving Japanese Folklore" premise and smorgasbord of seemingly dissimilar horror elements (here we have: UFOs, stab-happy psychopaths, everyday miracles, a leech child, patterned scars of demon possession, wispy bird ghosts, a squid faced ghost, a camera falling through a portal to another dimension, and (possibly) hell itself). Luckily, what keeps Occult an enjoyable romp, one that manages to stand somewhat apart from its successful forebear, is how nutty it is. Though twists are an expected attribute of any mystery, odds are that even the most seasoned consumers of paranormal enigmas will be unable to fathom the bizarro places that Occult travels to. The film's coda is unlike anything I've ever seen outside of Hausu (1977). What else distinguishes this later film from Noroi is its weird and welcome sense of humor, the most exquisite bit being one in which the documentary's subject, Eno-kun, a possessed man who has been compelled by unearthly forces to suicide bomb a bus station, decides to catch a showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) before committing his diabolical deed and afterwards reports that the movie helped to "cement his resolve." Shiraishi casts himself as the documentarian who films Eno-kun's descent into madness, which adds a smidgen of self-reflective fun, but even better is a cameo by fellow director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure (1997), Pulse (2001)), whose off-kilter and elusive horror films are an obvious influence to Shiraishi. A final aspect of note is the film's fantastic experimental score (some of which you can sample in the below trailer). The soundtrack grates and lulls the ears in equal measure, keeping its listener in a constant state of quiet agitation.

Shirome (2010) dir. Kôji Shiraishi

For his third crack of the found footage horror whip, Shiraishi went for Something Completely Different. Shirome features, at the very least, the most bizarre premise of any FF film yet produced: the real-life, all-teenaged-girl J-pop group Momoiro Clover is persuaded by a director (Shiraishi, once again casting himself in his own role) to be filmed entering a haunted and abandoned school to test out a spooky urban legend about a wish-granting demon, all in order to secure (through demon magic) a spot for the girls to perform on the popular annual television special Red and White Song Battle. In contrast to both Noroi and Occult, Shirome has some rather blatant subtext involving the exploitation of minors in the Japanese pop music industry. Whether intentional on Shiraishi's part or not, the inherently sinister quality of this exploitation is highlighted through both the girls' ultimate selling of their souls in order to achieve fame and their management's callous desire to coerce the girls into dangerous situations without concern for their welfare. The adults in the film also take it upon themselves to psychologically torture the girls: the fictional Shiraishi and his cohorts spend most of the film trying to scare the girls to tears, all in order to fashion a better cheap reality TV program. (In addition to these story-specific critiques of the industry, there are also moments that illuminate the systemic exploitation of young girls in the Japanese music industry as sexual objects. All of the members of Momoiro Clover are disconcertingly simplified, boiled down by their management to a few set characteristics and emotions that they must constantly display and personify. This isn't anything new for pop music, but it becomes more troubling when a 13-year-old girl describes herself (in a sung bio clearly prepared for her by her almost certainly adult male management) as the "little bit sexy" member of the group.) The fact that Shiraishi casts himself as the director exploiting the girls within the film (which, in recursive fashion, he actually is doing by making Shirome) appears to be an implicit acknowledgement of his own culpability, while at the same time using the film to stage a fairly scathing indictment of the absurd lengths the industry pushes pop idol groups to go to in order to achieve fame and success. Then again, it seems just as possible that cultural assumptions are skewing my interpretation towards critique, and that the film might merely be having goofy paranormal fun with a group of spirited pop idols. Either way, Shirome isn't all that fun. At about an hour and twenty minutes long, the film is rather brief and yet still aimless, with the sort of subtle supernatural creepiness that Shiraishi has established his reputation on failing to appear until far too late in the film. But the film is certainly a curiosity, one preferable to yet another FF film in the Noroi mode, even if the end product seems a few significant steps backwards with regard to story, pacing, and genuine horror.

Coming up, in our final installment: The Bay (2012), Area 407 (2012), The Dinosaur Project (2012), & The Frankenstein Theory (2013).

Meltdown 07: Found Footage Rewind (Part V)

Long Pigs (2007) dir. Nathan Hines & Chris Power

Nathan Hines and Chris Power's Long Pigs would probably seem more revelatory in a world that didn't already possess Man Bites Dog (1992). Sub out a murderous thief for a murderous cannibal and the situation prodding forth the narrative in Long Pigs is nearly identical to that of its spiritual predecessor: a documentary film crew chooses as its subject a dangerous criminal and becomes complicit in his crimes while documenting him as he demonstrates his process and extolls the virtues of his own twisted life philosophy. Yet, this substitution of the documentary subject's profession leads Long Pigs down some unique pathways of contemplation concerning (of all things) the morality of our dietary choices. The need for food-- or, more specifically, the desire for tasty food that provides gustatory pleasure in addition to sustenance-- creates in some human beings the mindset that exquisite cuisine is an unalienable right afforded to those who can acquire it. The moral dimension of consuming other living beings merely for the taste that they provide is neglected entirely by the connoisseur mindset. The dictum become "I eat others because I can." This is a position not unfamiliar to the majority of Western citizens who, whether consciously or not, eat cheeseburgers while driving their children to the petting zoo, and who turn a blind eye toward the mechanized horrors of the slaughterhouse they purchase from while being unable to inflict the same damage on a living animal to produce a meal for themselves. For these people, the taste of meat overrides any ethical quandaries that would stand in the way of enjoying it, which allows them to never meaningfully engage with the cognitive dissonance they should be experiencing. But there is also a more advanced specimen of this mindset, the civilized hunter, who is so deeply deluded by his desire for new tastes that he no longer views other creatures as anything but objects, products, and walking foodstuff. 

Long Pigs' cannibal subject, Anthony (Anthony Alviano) has simply taken the unreflective carnivore's consumption practices to the furthest limit they could possibly achieve, tossing off the final shred of human morality in his quest for good eats. In one scene Anthony calmly, almost lovingly field dresses the corpse of one of his human victims, narrating his progress and stressing the importance of tying off the anus in order to prevent contamination of the meat. In a later scene, "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" plays over sped up footage of yet another human field dressing. He tells his documentarians, with assumed authority, that "one animal is as good as the next," and that there's no point in considering the morality of what we eat when "even broccoli has feelings." His logic is obviously daft, but what frightens is that though he may be attempting to justify his horrific eating practices to his observers, he needs no such justification for his own conscience. If we independently decide or are culturally indoctrinated to look at animals as nothing more than food, and if we simultaneously recognize that humans are merely animals, what is to prevent one from not assuming that the consumption of other human beings is not also acceptable? Despite this blatant subtext, the film does not at all resemble a smug, satirical tract against the consumption of animals on the grounds of ethics. Though it's an exploration of a character who has chosen to ignore the taboos of society and twist its own assumptions (perhaps accurately) to satisfy his own greed, the film doesn't appear to take a very clear position against anyone other than the exploitative filmmakers, who get what's coming to them. This ambivalence leaves the film unanchored to any solid basis of ethics, but not necessarily to the film's detriment: the character of Anthony remains a personification of the philosophical ills of society that we are all, in fact, complicit in. How can we mount an argument against his practices that is not, at its base, hypocritical? And when his practices include killing and eating a child, it's safe to say that we have a problem. Though the film is disinterested in the formal experimentation and metafictional genre probing of similar Man Bites Dog-influenced mockumentary horror films like J. T. Petty's S&Man (2006) and Scott Glosserman's Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), Long Pigs nevertheless makes an intriguing and often disturbing entry into this curious emerging sub-subgenre.

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012) dir. Martin Andersen

Examining their upcoming slate of feature films reveals that The Asylum production studio does not appear poised to revitalize their poor reputation. The company was founded upon the production of an endless stream of what has been dubbed "mockbusters," or films that feature titles and content roughly similar to recent major studio fare, released concurrently if not before the bigger pictures they're aping. Though the studio has branched away from this formula on occasion, it's clear that creativity is not their strong suit. In recent years they've produced seven FF films (what they call, amusingly, "reality" films), and while not every one of them has a clear blockbuster that it's mocked up to resemble, they all still manage to capture the general trend of the genre at the moment. Their latest, 100 Ghost Street, is in the Grave Encounters haunted asylum mode and, perhaps astonishingly, is really no worse than any of the other films sporting that featherweight premise. It's a shallow and mostly unengaging film, though dotted throughout with moments of, if not outright fright, certainly the desire to produce fright. The recurring motif of a plethora of black feathers discovered in bizarre locations (inside the asylum's walls; in its toilets) is almost creepy, and the discovery of a trail of fresh blood leading from the floor, up a wall, and into a hatch in the ceiling certainly is. As is the case with most of The Asylum's "reality" films I've seen thus far, 100 Ghost Street is needlessly exploitative, using sexual violence to titillate rather than disgust or unnerve. (I will take this moment to remind you of the tasteful scene in their earlier effort 8213: Gacy House (2010) in which John Wayne Gacy's ghost anally rapes a young man.) In this case, the film features two fits of repugnant The Entity-styled ghost rape (the second of which being, at the very least, a surprising narrative callback to the legend of the titular Richard Speck, made all the more icky by the fact that the person assaulted is a corpse). The lousy CGI, though present throughout, is understated in a way that The Vicious Brothers obviously weren't capable of when creating Grave Encounters, so in that one respect it's an improvement. But, ultimately, all we're doing is applauding a perpetual failure for failing slightly less spectacularly this time around.

Paranormal Entity (2009) dir. Shane Van Dyke

 

Paranormal Entity was The Asylum's second blatant FF mockbuster, coming a year after their Cloverfield homage, Monster (2008). Because it's essentially a domestic drama spurred on by a ghostly demon infestation, Paranormal Entity contains some slightly more interesting thematic content than the bulk of the studio's FF offerings, but only very slightly, signalling that any weight we detect was probably accidental, at best. Its opening text Revelation of Fate spoils all of what's to come after, as it doesn't take long for us to realize that the rape and murder of Samantha Finley (Erin Marie Hogan) by her older brother Thomas (Shane Van Dyke) is supernaturally tinged and not at all influenced by the sleazy doubly incestual angle that it hints at once or twice. At certain moments Paranormal Entity appears to be poking fun of its source material's lapses in logic by humorously amending them: in this film the characters at least try to go to a motel after the ghost shenanigans begin to intensify (though it does not go well), and at one point an exorcism of the house is about to be performed by a psychic before the scene smash cuts to a shot of the same psychic lying dead on the ground. But mostly this is an earnest affair, the filmmakers replacing Paranormal Activity's successful bits with worse ones. Ineptitude is running pretty high when the most frightening static shot jump scare you can muster is a crucifix falling down from a wall.

 

Invasion (a.k.a. Infection) (2005) dir. Albert Pyun

Albert Pyun, director of Cyborg (1989), Captain America (1990), and Dollman (1991), is a master of schlock and Invasion is that exactly. It rides (literally) on its one-take, COPS-inspired police cruiser dashboard camera gimmick. Though, unlike the also seemingly one-take Last Ride (2011), I detected many points in Pyun's film at which a cut could have occurred, and I suspect they did. Unfortunately, any such cuts don't help to make the film less of a drag. Communicating much of the small town alien invasion story through police dispatch banter is a novel concept, making the film feel like an effective radio play bolstered by occasional on-screen action, but all too often even the dialogue drifts away and we're stranded inside the car as it cruises up and down forest dirt roads. At these moments, accompanied as they are by the film's over-dramatic orchestral score, you'd be hard pressed to find an FF film more sleep-inducing. Budget stock sound effects, alien slugs that crawl into people's ears, and a nuclear holocaust fill out the rest of the story. (What's frightfully unclear is how exactly the footage from the police camera survives the atomic blast. Do police cruisers double as refrigerators?) Invasion concludes with a perhaps record-setting 20 minutes of end credits. What more need I say?

Next time, a tsunami of Japanese found footage: Noroi: The Curse (2005), Occult (2009), & Shirome (2010).