Ten Statements About....SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS (2001)

This woman has just shot a man to death...and she's your hero.

"These cats don't have nine lives."

1) Even though it doesn't fully fit into the purview of 'found footage,' this is one of the most effective examples of that subgenre.  It tells a compelling story, it justifies why we're getting all the footage that we might not otherwise expect to see, and it hints at a larger tapestry that shores up the world the film is set in.

2) ....and that might be the most intriguing thing about the film--the fact that the story, ostensively episodes from the seventh season of this demented reality show, takes place in this weird alternative nightmare universe that implies our society has gone down a very dark, very unpleasant path.  And yet nowhere does writer/director David Minaham spell it all out for you.  We know that the government has a hand in this reality show, we know that they manipulate the results, and we know there's a darker purpose behind all this--but we never learn the truths behind these circumstances.

3) Of course, this film would not work without strong performances, and the strongest performance is by Brooke Smith as our central character Dawn.  We see Dawn do some truly brutal things--there's a brief sequence where Minaham contrasts Dawn's interview with footage of many of her previous kills that is ruthless in its violence--and yet she manages to get a great deal of humanity and sympathy at points, particularly when she takes a moment to comfort the wife of a just-murdered contestant.

Don't pity this woman despite her deer-in-the-headlights
expression...because she won't pity you....

4) ....and on the other end of the spectrum we have Marylouise Burke as Connie, who is a horrific monster of a character--and yet believes one hundred percent that she is not evil, that she is motivated by her Christian values.  And Minaham never presents Connie as anything other than a ruthless killer, right from her first interview where she admits to 'helping' people who suffer pass on to the next world ('This happens more often than you think,' she adds after this confession!).

5) This is a violent film that comes by its R rating thoroughly honestly, and yet the violence onscreen is relatively restrained.  That being said, the brutality and intensity in the way Minaham presents this violence throughout makes some of it rough to watch, particular the film's biggest setpiece set at a suburban mall.

6) The film is hard to categorize.  Even though it doesn't have any gruesome elements, I'd almost categorize it as a horror film for the pitch black view of society it has....but the film is also richly and darkly comic.  Minaham knows he has to give us a release valve and peppers the film with some moment of genuine, twisted humor.  Even the narration--ably provided by Will Arnett, of all people!--gives us some lines that allow us to laugh nervously between the horrific elements.

And what would a reality show be without a car chase?

7) I do like how Minaham does play with our expectations when it comes to the reality show 'script.'  The person we expect to be the first to be picked off is the one who commits the most henious act of violence; the person who we expect to be the mildest is the one who is the most venomous contender.  And since Minaham worked as a story editor for newsmagazine shows prior to directing this film, he's managed to perfectly recreate the way these shows can deceive the public and bend the narrative.

8) ...and that might be why the film didn't do well in its theatrical run.  Minaham is too precise in his recreation of The Contenders TV show, resulting in us not having that slight distance that satire sometimes need.  Even though we're given absurd moments (Dawn being unable to register a kill because a cameraman gets in the way; hostages cheering when a character announces 'people will die'--not realizing that the people that are being referred to are themselves; etc.), they don't feel like commentary; they feel like an example of the thing Minaham is commenting on.  And as such, sometimes the comments don't through to the viewer.

9) ....although I will admit that the 'recreation' of the film's denoument is wonderfully lame, featuring actors who look uncannily like Smith and Glenn Fitzgerald, who plays Jeff....if you looked at them sideways.  As with the rest of the film, the recreation of reality show tropes is uncanny, but unlike elsewhere, Minaham manages to create that little separation so we can appreciate the half-assedness spin control the producers of the show try to achieve.

10) Can I say I love Girls Vs. Boys' soundtrack, which mananges to subsume their noise rock qualities when they need to to recreate cheesy reality show muzak muck, and are able to take a back seat to other composers when they have to (like that hilarious usage of Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' when it comes to delineating Dawn's backstory).

Overall...even though it may fail as a pure satire, this film excels as a really frightening extrapolation of what our present society's obsession with reality TV can result in.  Held together by a magnificent and ruthless performance at its center, it also serves as a great example of how you can use 'found footage' tropes to tell a really great story.

Ten Statements About.... THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012)

Ladies and Gentlemen--the most persuasive argument for
buying a Posturpedic bed....

"Do you know how to connect the cuts?"

1) Ahhhh, found footage, we meet again....and once more I find you wanting as an effective way to tell a story. The artifice of the found footage conceit keeps getting in the way of any sort of narrative flow this story has.

2) But here is something very positive about this film--it takes pains to set up its world, present its rules and, most importantly, sticks to them. The only moment where the continuity of this story doesn't quite make sense is with a factor that occurs before the story itself takes place, so the film's logic is not disrupted much. And to be fair, I may be the only person who caught this contradiction.

3) ...but then, I'm the only person in this very empty theater who I suspect was listening closely enough to figure out what was happening; the dopey young man who started shouting at the screen 'This is whack' when the film was over didn't. The script by director William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterson has a very clear idea of where they're going and takes the time to lay the groundworks for the trip they want to take us on meticulously. However, these pieces of information that leads us through the narrative are frequently badly submerged by the soundmix, vital clues said in such a whisper as to be unintelligible.

4) And I have great respect for the fact that even though the film wants to be subtle, it doesn't shirk on Showing Us The Monkey. There are three key scenes that are pure special effects laden monster-show-ness, and there are some beats in those scenes which manages to wonderfully blend subtle with brash at the same time. However....

Sometimes, you have bad hair days, but...YE GODS!

5) ...that damn CGI fly. In the middle of what is arguably the film's highpoint, we get a fake green fly escaping from Suzan Crowley's Maria's mouth and making a b-line for Evan Helmuth's David. What's insane is that the script makes the big turning point in the film clear through dialogue and narrative cues both before and after that scene, making the freaking fly pointless.

6) Wow, Mr. Bell....there's that key scene where you make it clear that David is going to drown that baby during a baptism, and you work it out so that you're going 'no, you won't....no, you won't...no you--MY GOD YOU DID'....except you wimp out and give us that dialogue that tells us the baby's okay. It cheats the audience, makes them feel stupid for thinking you were actually going to do, and ultimately makes them uninterested in investing in all the scares that follows thereafter.

7) Here's another fundamental problem with the film--of the four main characters, one (Fernanda Andrade's Isabella) is played by a woman who has appeared on a number of high profile TV shows, one in a recurring role. Another (Simon Quarterman's Ben) has an equally large career, albeit more in the indie film realm. Throughout the film, I had a nagging feeling I had seen Isabella before, and that continued to put me at arm's length. One of the basic rules of found footage is that you need actors we don't recognize, and having one of the central actors being so easily recognizable defeats the purpose of making it a found footage film in the first place.

"What do I wanna do?  I don't know...bum around, drown an
infant, become possessed by an honking big demon and then
committing suicide...how about you?"

8) Another thing about this film--everyone has a certain Caucasian Wankery Network feel to them, especially Ben and Isabella. Of all the found footage films I have watched, the characters within them that feel the most real to me--Lizzy Kaplan's Marlene in Cloverfield, Katy Featherstone's Katy in Paranormal Activity, even Heather O'Donoghue's Heather in The Blair Witch Project--worked because they didn't look like actors, but like real, recognizable people. I'm not saying these men and women are too pretty--both Kaplan and Featherstone were very attractive and sexy in their way--but they don't have the feeling of being the kind of people you could see on the street. It's another small strike against the film that makes it fall short of success.

9) Not surprisingly, the most effective person at selling the film's found footage pedigree is Suzan Crowley, who plays Isabella's mother and the source of two of the three big shock scenes. It's not for nothing that her face is the central image of the film's poster. She is very effective in playing a woman who could be insane, could be possessed, and more importantly, she not only looks like she could have given birth to Isabella, she looks like a normal human being.

10) You know....I really have to wonder if the film's biggest sin is its stubborn insistence in sticking to the found footage meme. So many of the film's flaws that I cite above could easily have been solved by abandoning that already dubious genre and embracing the script's obvious desire to be a full on, conventional narrative horror film.

Overall...not the worst found footage film I've seen, and not a good film overall, but one I can at least put in the 'Ambitious Failure' bin. The simple fact is its pedigree drags it down, and I almost wish it could have been done as a full on narrative film.

I saw this at the AMC Village Seven with three other people, one of which laughed at strange times, and the other two chose to carry on a running conversation--one of which was the abovemention man who went off on a rant about how awful he felt the film was. Most of the trailers were ones I already saw before, save for G.I. Joes: Retribution (which, as much as I liked the dumb fun of the first film, may actually surpass it--even if just because we see The Rock firing a big gun and Bruce Willis mowing down people from a pick-up truck) and Gone (which I may end up seeing, because the idea of Amanda Seyfried running around Seattle in pursuit of her sister's kidnapper, yelling and shooting all the way, appeals to me).

Ten Statements About....BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH PROJECT II: (2000)

Sorry, Jeffrey..no Sam Axe for you...

"If you don't believe in The Blair Witch, why the Hell did you come?"

"I thought the movie was cool."

1) Joe Berlinger, a documentarian who must have rolled his eyes when given this assignment, actually does the best he can to both 'conform to the reality' of the original film while pretty much telling all of us, 'you know the first film was a load of made-up stuff, right?' Simple tricks like naming the characters similarly to the actors who play them, the inclusion of actual clips and real-like personages as talking heads,designing the film so it looks like a documentary--even creating a title sequence that mirrors Berlinger's own documentary Paradise Lost: The Murders At Robin Hood Hills all contribute to the sense that this could have happened..just as Berlinger is winking at you and telling you it's never did.

2) It is so weird seeing Jeffrey Donovan playing the twitchy, disturbed Jeffrey Patternson. You almost expect him to call up Bruce Campbell to clear this mess up at a moment's notice. He's actually pretty funny at times, and you can see what USA Networks saw when they gave the go-ahead to his casting in Burn Notice...and his flashback to his time in the asylum is just...strange enough to make you realize this is not going to end well.

3) And speaking of it not ending well...Berlinger seems to delight in just piling on the intimations that this is a doomed tour from the beginning. Giving us a full pass into Jeffrey's mind, letting us know this is his first time leading a tour, Kim's admission that she might be a little unstable as well...it wouldn't surprise me if Berlinger approached this as something of a satire of the original hysteria that rose up over the first film.

Believe it or not, Kim Director's Kim is at her sanest when
she's dressed like this...

4) Just as one of the strength's of Myrick and Sanchez' first film was their ability to cast three leads with chemistry and personality, Berlinger seems to have worked hard to get a similar group of actors together. This quartet--besides Donovan, stand-outs include the absolutely hilarious Kim Director as a goth chick who isn't buying into all this and the absolutely gob-stoppingly hot Erica Leershen as an actual witch with some dotty ideas--does have a good give-and-take that helps us buy into the film's gag for most of its running time.

5) ...and I use the word 'gag' deliberately. I honestly don't think that this film was meant to be taken seriously. When you actually listen to some of the stuff that is said--like Erica's intention to beseech the Blair Witch to be her mentor--you realize that this film works best as a satire commenting on what went down around the time of the first film's release.

6) If there is a weak link in this central cast, it is Stephen Barker Turner, who's given the unenviable task of being the group skeptic. And while I get the sense that his character is Berlinger's mouthpiece, and that the points he's making are connected to Berlinger's own views on the matter, he ends up becoming something of a Scully--refusing to accept any counter arguments to his own views.

7) At first I wasn't sure why Berlinger chose to do all these flash forwards to the Really Bad Thing That Happens throughout the first act--but then I realized it was to obscure the moment when it actually happens (for the record, my guess is it happens at the 22 minute mark, when we start seeing Kim's and Tristene Skyler's Trinsten's hallucinations and dreams--just before the rain of paper).

Erica Leershen...mmmmmmm.....

8) I have to wonder if the few creature effects shots were absolutely necessary; they seem out of place in a film where so much of what Berlinger is selling us is based on our perceptions and the unreliability of the narrator--why shout when he's doing just fine whispering how these five people are Not To Be Trusted? Much more effective are the simple tricks, like when Sheriff Craven talks to the group via a pre-taped television report.

9) I am not a fan of Lanny Flaherty's Sheriff Cravens. He's too over-the-top, too obviously playing a part in a movie that every time he shows up it makes the film a bit less smart....

10) It's odd how the real central horror of the third act revolves around how everyone sort of changes places. And the person who comes off the scariest is the least scary member of our crew, Tristin...who becomes the epitome of unhinged just before meeting her fate, daring others to do what she so desperately wants to do herself. Or at least, what others think she wants to do....

Overall...a film that maybe is a little too clever for its own good (the fact that the title refers back to the film itself--something I didn't realize until it was pointed out by Scott Aslin's excellent review of the film--doesn't help any), but still a pretty effective unreliable narrator film. It's certainly the best a sequel could possibly have been to a film that was more of an event than an actual, you know, film.

Ten Statements About....PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007)

Experience The Terror...of STANDING!

1) Let's get it out of the way: No, this is not the scariest film ever made...it's interesting in its way, and has its moments, but scariest ever? No.

2) I give mad props to director/writer Oren Peli for standing his grounds and not allowing it to be remade by Paramount. The effectiveness of the film would have been hurt by some name actor and actress playing Katie and Micah....and speaking of Katie...

3) I love that Katie Featherston is a heavyset woman, yet is portrayed as being sexy and desirable--and that Micah finds her so. This emphasizes her 'veracity' as a real person more than using the actress' real name for her character does.

4) There are some nice, smart touches in the script that defuse certain problems--the best arguably being how Peli makes it clear that it's not the house that's anchoring this entity, but Katie herself. Thus, even when I thought 'Why don't they just leave?,' I realized immediately why that would be pointless.

5) It's refreshing that Peli never gives in to the 'shaky-cam' to re-inforce veracity--in fact, a simple title card makes it clear why there is no shakey-cam while also explaining some of the filmmaker-ly editing tricks in the movie.

6) Micah is a jerk. He consistently ignores his girlfriend's wishes at every turn, treats this situation as a territorial fight, and seems to think of this situation Katie's been going through since the age of eight as a game. Thus, when he meets his ultimate fate, my reaction was 'serves you right, jackass.'

7) There is no reason for the psychic to show up the second time, and that appearance only reinforces the actor's limited ability. Likewise, why bring up that Dr. Avery fella if he never plays any role in the film?

8) The biggest flaw with this film is how all the entropic elements are fairly pedestrian, and are all telegraphed the same way. The moment we hear that noise that sounds like an air conditioner being turned on, it's a sure thing there's another 'spooky' scare coming.

9) Okay, the cursor on the Ouija Board was kind of neat, if predictable...and it leads to one of the cooler character moments for Micah in the film. But to have it spontaneously combust as well?

10) This film is really built more to be seen with a full audience, where you can feed off the energy of your fellow filmgoers. Watching it in a near-empty auditorium blunted the impact of some of the better scares.

In short...I can see the potential in Peli, and this is better than some of the faux-Blair Witch flicks--Lord knows it kicks Quarantine's ass, especially when it springs an almost identical 'dragged away' gag on us. But its reputation has written out a check the film's quality cannot cash. See it with a bunch of strangers you could love.