SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - YE OF LITTLE FAITH

There are many horror movies that are good until the last act, when they turn into such complete shit that it's frankly hard to remember what was good about everything up to that point. Many horror movies. The Last Exorcism, from 2010, is not necessarily distinct within that company; it does not start at the highest height, nor does it reach the lowest low. But it does stand out for how brief the bad ending actually is: only about 12 minutes before the credits is all it takes to undo the goodwill generated by a generally sturdy 74 minutes preceding.

We'll return to those 12 minutes in due course; for now, it does to accentuate the positive. To begin with, The Last Exorcism is one of those faux-documentary jobs, right before they really took off. I swear, that's one of the positive things, even though I know all the terrible things people say about the inaptly-named found footage style. I have, after all, said a great many of them. That's exactly the thing that's so nifty about the movie though (in fact, it's probably its most distinctive strength): there's a really smart, motivated reason for almost every frame of the movie that we see to have been recorded by the in-universe cameraman, Daniel Moskowitz (Adam Grimes), and his director, documentarian Iris Reisen (Iris Bahr). They are, after all, making a documentary about a charismatic exorcist, Rev. Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian). They don't know at the start that he'll be called on an exorcism, but they undoubtedly had their fingers crossed. The spooky, threatening incidents that usually trigger the wave of "put the camera down and run, dipshit" complaints are going to have the exact opposite effect on them: that is exactly what they want to film. Iris probably spends every night wishing herself to sleep that there will be some alarming, inexplicable terror to rattle her and Daniel around the room. And the way the footage is presented is exactly like an assembly cut that needs onscreen titles and some sweetening to the sound. Mind you, the film's ending commits the usual sins, and they are magnified by how solid everything up to that point has been: the way the story wraps up makes it clear that nobody would have cut the film together, and if they had, we'd never have seen it. But before then! In terms of sheer formal plausibility, it's as tight as any other found footage movie since the airtight The Blair Witch Project.

The content of Huck Botko & Andrew Gurland's script isn't too shabby itself, though it does tend to err on the side of self-congratulation. Cotton is the very definition of a good ol' boy blood & thunder preacher: anxious to give his parishioners a good show even while he's assuring them that if they make even the slightest misstep, they'll be devoured by the eternal flames of Hell. It's hardcore conservative Evangelical Protestantism with a healthy dose of Manichaeism, and it's all perfectly fraudulent. As Cotton concedes with a startling lack of shame for a man staring directly into a camera lens, he had a crippling crisis of faith when his sickly son was healed and his immediate response was to be grateful for the doctors, not God. Later on a news article about a boy his son's age died during a botched exorcism, and that shook the rest of his belief out; now he's going through the motions strictly for the benefit of his flock, on the assumption that as long as his words improve their lives, there's no harm done. "You've been a fraud", Iris accuses him, with an obvious "gotcha" tone; "That's your word, not mine", he tosses back with a big smile.

These Elmer Gantry-esque exploration of the pastor as con man and huckster are tremendously engaging, thanks almost completely to Fabian's sweeping, gregarious performance, all broad smiles and large gestures and a big way of dominating the room. He's slimy and slick, but in a way that invites us to join him in his fun trickery; his early demonstration that a recipe for banana bread can be slid into a fired-up sermon without anybody noticing is, to me, the film's most unique and enjoyable moment. The only problem with all this is that it's frankly a bit easy: taking potshots at charismatic preachers and then smirking like some kind of wounding hit has been taken is the pettiest, littlest kind of smug urbanity. We've seen this before; the charm of Fabian's performance augments that truth, but doesn't fix it.

Then again, we've seen just about everything The Last Exorcism has to offer, if we've seen more than one or two movies with "Exorcism" or "Exorcist" in the title, and the audience for a found-footage demonic possession movie is nothing if not self-selecting along those lines. Cotton gets a particularly intriguing request from a rural family, begging for help with a possession; its hand-written nature appeals to him, so off he and the filmmakers go to find out what's happening. 16-year-old Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell) has been acting peculiar, if slaughtering her father's livestock can be summed up with such a simple word as "peculiar". Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) subscribes to the most archly paranoiac type of faith; he pulled his daughter and son from school because she wasn't being exposed to sufficiently Godly music in art class, among more typical reasons. He even stopped going to church with local Pastor Manley (Tony Bentley), presumably for not enough old time religion. Cotton, for his part, puts on a good show, using some electric doodads to convince the Sweetzers, including elder child Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) that he's chasing a demon out of the girl, and calls it a good deed. But when Nell shows up at his hotel, he grows concerned that something deeper than the usual psychosomatic Sturm und Drang is going on, so he forced Louis to have her hospitalised, over the man's terror of modern medicine. And it just so happens that Nell is pregnant. Cotton and Iris immediately jump to the assumption that she's been raped by her father, but this is a movie called The Last Exorcism, and we can be forgiven for assuming it's a little more sneaky than that.

But not sneaky in the way you'd think: the idea the film starts to play around with is that Nell is suffering from a bad case of being 16 years old and having a desire to express her sexuality while trapped in an environment of severest repressions (it becomes clear later in the movie that Louis would much rather assume that his daughter has been raped than that she had sex of her own choosing). And so she has sublimated her desire to have sex and break away from her insanely puritanical family life into the form of a made-up trickster demon named Abalam, because movie demons have the worst fucking names.* But at least it lacks the slurry Zs of "Pazuzu". Sorry The Exorcist, but you have a goofy-sounding bad guy.

None of this is, as such, particularly new or exciting or brave, and like many and many an exorcism film before it, The Last Exorcism doesn't work very hard to enter into the actual possession victim's head, if only because it needs very hard to keep us wondering if she's suffering from paranormal or strictly psychological torments (for a much better experiment in the same mode, we have the 2006 German film Requiem). In The Exorcist, they could get away with that; it is a film mostly about the responses people have to the possession. Here, they cannot. Cotton starts out with a very Father Karras-ish plot arc as the man of the cloth who's lost his faith and must regain it by fighting with actual spiritual evil, but the film maintains the possibility that there is no demon for so long that he's never forced to do anything but reiterate that, as always, he's right and it's just one big psychosomatic stress. Besides, he instantly ceases to be an interesting, colorful character when he arrives at the Sweetzer home. Louis is mostly there to be nervous and plaintive - Herthum works much too hard to make the character likable, which helps in complicating the script's self-superior attitude, but not for adding an edge to the suggestion that Nell has been driven crazy by a wretch of father - and Caleb is only ever on the sidelines, which means that we're basically watching activity being performed rather than characters having feelings.

And so, for all its stabs at complexity, The Last Exorcism proves to be pretty much a generic spook show, with the usual guttural speech and self-mutilation of all the other exorcism movies. It has one strikingly original and deeply disturbing gore scene, when Nell uses the camera to beat a cat to death - its blood remains streaked on the lens for quite some time - but director Daniel Stamm otherwise offers no personalising touches to a movie that has only the gritty cheapness of the first person aesthetic to differentiate itself from 37 years of Exorcist knock-offs. Still, it acquits itself well enough for all of that; the last big exorcism movie prior to 2010 was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and The Last Exorcism movie beats that one senseless.

So the film heads into the final stretch with a steady gait and head held high, and then it trips and head-plants into the asphalt. I'm not sure when exactly the set the marker for the film's descent into total garbage; the extremely ill-timed interview with an awkward gay teen boy (Logan Craig Reid) whom Nell had named as the real father of her non-demonic baby is the first point that I said loud, in an empty room "Well, what the fuck". Certainly, by the point that Stamm crash-zooms into a pentagram painted on the Sweetzers' wall as the music gives us the most generic sting (so much for found-footage artlessness), it's all over but the tetchy wind-down, as the film erases its ambiguity in the most speedy, arbitrary series of twists, reveals, and ginned-up jump scares possible, complete with a sudden flurry of death because, dammit, this was a horror movie, and we had best leave nobody alive, right?

It's not the most sudden nosedive in quality a horror film could take; strictly limiting ourselves to movies that premiered in 2010, it's not as calling as the third act descent into putresence that mars the splendid opening hour of Insidious. But it's still enormously misconceived and stupidly blunt, and the moderate strengths of The Last Exorcism up to that point aren't able to survive it.

Body Count: 3, with a 4th who's clearly going to die pretty soon. Also that poor cat.

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later than 1997, and not a soft-core cable porno). Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den, it's only superficially the same thing. It is the rarest of the rare: it has created a totally new set of storytelling tools, laying out the rules for a new kind movie that, a year or two from now, I am hopeful might be used in a really aggressive, challenging way, the first great work of quintessentially Millennial art.

The problem is that Unfriended, aside from inventing a new language, is shit.

But I would like to accentuate the positive for starters, since the things that are bad about Unfriended are common to a great many poor horror films, and the things that are good are almost totally unique. The notion is that high school student Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are all ready to have a fun night of sexually taunting each other on Skype, when their friends Jess Felton (Renee Olstead), Adam Sewell (Will Peltz), and Ken "Kennington" Smith (Jacob Wysocki) jump into the fray, somehow, using computer trickery best described as "the screenwriter wanted it". The five of them banter a bit, getting increasingly annoyed at the sixth individual apparently listening in on their call, trying to figure it out, accusing snotty frenemy Val Rommel (Courtney Halverson) of being the hacker and dragging her into their chat, and only eventually figuring out that what might be going, and since this is a horror film, "might be" = "surely is", is that the dead Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide one year ago tonight, could be haunting everybody she thinks is responsible for bullying her into killing herself following a humiliating YouTube video that showed her drunk and covered in her own filth. Which does in fact mean that she wants revenge on, basically, the whole school, and I imagine that's to be the sequel hook.

Now, there's nothing special about any of that, except that the whole film is shown as a shot of of Blaire's MacBook desktop. And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S, and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den. It is, literally, the whole of the desktop, with .jpgs and folders visible around the edges of windows that include Chrome, Skype, Apple iMessage, and Spotify, at least. Which is one important thing already: Unfriended uses name brand programs, and that adds immeasurably to its sense of realism compared to movies that have people using InstaChat and searching on Snoople, or whatever drippy pseudonyms the copyright-dodging screenwriter came up with that week.

That's lovely, but the really exciting thing, what makes Unfriended totally new in my experience, is that it's showing us the unfiltered version of what happens on Blaire's computer: we see the entire record of her life online, with all the various traces of abandoned thoughts on the titles of browser tabs and in her Facebook history, the programs she had open when she started to flirt with Mitch. And other than the appearance of the mouse arrow as she selects what she's focusing on, there's nothing in the movie to guide our eye; we simply get to decide whether it's the actual video of Laura's death we want to stare at, or the sidebar of "also suggested" videos, we can spy on her song playlist. What Unfriended has done is lay out the rules for how a movie can depict and move through that digital space; it has given the foundation to a filmmaker who wants to go for broke and really experiment by making all of that unfocused side detail where the actual storytelling happens, using scraps and errata that we can look at but don't have to, leaving swaths of important character detail spread out across a screen such that we can't see everything and have to prioritise what to look at. Unfriended even starts to be aware of that possibility, as it leaves sometimes up to six different video chat screens playing at once, and not always having the most prominent ones include the most interesting information.

That being said, while I have no doubt that a truly radical experimental narrative shall be made using this aesthetic, Unfriended is absolutely not it - all that wonderful space it leaves itself for squirreling away important bits of information in little side details is wasted on in-jokes and generic filler, the functional equivalent of "lorem ipsum" paragraphs. And it can't even be bothered to keep continuity straight: the action is clarified to take place in April, and we see certain Facebook well-wishes that are time-stamped to "January" and "X hours ago" at different points, all in story that takes place in real time over 80 minutes. There's also a countdown that skips from 10 to 5. So much for hiding interesting details in plain sight.

The plot, meanwhile, is generic "revenge against the obnoxious teenagers" boilerplate, interesting solely in that the exposition is given out of order and throughout the entire movie, so it all seems a bit more mysterious than in your average slasher, where we understand the point of the revenge more or less from the beginning. But a slasher is exactly what it boils down to, including both the regressive sexual morality (we discover that one character isn't a virgin at exactly the point that the movie begins to turn against that character) and the one-word personality types: the Druggie, the Horndog, the Bitch, the Geek, the Bitch (2), and the Hypocrite. Screenwriter Nelson Greaves's desire to structure this as a mystery and give the film a sucker punch twist ending turn into a tawdry trick, thereby trivialising the only thing about the story that had any prayer of being interesting: the film thinks that it's telling a complex tale of how bullying works in the age of social media, pointing out that bullies can be bullied themselves, and that dogpiling is a horrible fucking thing to do to people, no matter how distasteful they are. But its reliance on cheap horror tropes and shabby shocks devalues that theme significantly.

It's painfully unscary - I suspect that watching it on a television or, preferably, a computer might give it more oomph than seeing it in a movie theater possibly could - and includes one of the most contrived death scenes in recent horror cinema (assuming one would, for whatever reason, keep a blender in their bedroom, would it even so be possible to commit suicide with it?). And the filmmakers' enthusiasm for the Kids and their Ways leads ultimately to a deeply misguided climax built around a high-stakes game of "Never Have I Ever" that is bafflingly silly. So, let's be clear, I emphatically do not recommend this film. It's like someone invented the English language by writing The Da Vinci Code. But I do look forward to recommending its most successful knock-offs a few years down the road.

5/10

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WHEN IDIOTS WERE IN EGYPT'S LAND

If there's anything that could imaginably help The Pyramid to stand out in the cramped world of low-budget horror (spoiler alert: there is not), it would be the surprising way that the film confounds the expectations of first-person camera filmmaking. The film equips itself with a grand total of three POV machines - one documentary cameraman, one badass archaeology chick with a little head camera, and one Mars rover on loan from NASA - which already sets us up with plenty of reasonably decent excuses to cut around locations like a proper movie, but that's apparently not sufficient for director Grégory Levasseur (Alexandre Aja's longtime screenwriter making his directorial debut; Aja is on-hand to produce). Frequently, the film abandons those perspectives entirely, for a new position not merely where the characters aren't, but where they can't be: on at least two occasions, the camera sets up shop on the inside of a room that the characters are about to enter, a room that is specifically defined as being a place that humans have not set foot in a bajillionty-hundred years.

On the one hand, I admire Levasseur's decision; it allows him access to the one dubious strength of the first-person style (we more closely identify with the characters in the moment of a jump scare) without having to shackle himself to its many, many limitations of cheap-looking footage and tortured justifications for including any kind of camera in every single scene. But then, having given itself room to actually do something with the form, The Pyramid doubles-down, hard, on the found-footage conceit that has increasingly been silently abandoned by first-person movies: the very first thing that we see are title card explaining with documentary crispness that what we're about to watch is the record of what happened outside of Cairo on such and such a date in 2013. Those with a keen sense of recent history will thus be able to guess what the second thing that we see turns out to be: smoke billowing out of Cairo and masses of political protesters, whose actions sit way deep in the background of the movie's plot, crassly setting up a ticking clock that feebly drives the action as the first act shades into the second. Is it the most tasteless insertion of tremendously significant real-life events into a junk drawer horror picture in all of history? No, certainly not. But might very well be the most tasteless of such gestures in 2014, particularly when we take the time to note that of the six primary characters, the two specifically defined as being ethnically Egyptian are also the first two to die.

Anyway, this conceptually unsound depiction of what happened on that fateful day initially takes the form of footage being shot by "Fitzie" (James Buckley), of bold, adventurous Sunni (Christa Nicola), who is by all accounts a documentary filmmaker, though we absolutely never see her perform any action that suggests that she's not a second-string news reporter. They're there to capture the exciting new discovery made by father-daughter archaeologist team Holden (Denis O'Hare) and Nora (Ashley Hinshaw), he a fusty old traditionalist, she a tech-savvy progressive, whose work with satellites (we see one such satellite, from a perspective somewhere in outer space; so much for found footage) has uncovered an unknown pyramid beneath the Egyptian desert. And not just any pyramid; a three-sided pyramid! Or as we call them in the real world, a tetrahedron, but superstar high-tech archeologists don't have time for no ten-cent words.

Just after determining that the pyramid has some kind of horrible toxic dust polluting its air, but before sending their Mars rover "Shorty", operated by hunky engineer Michael (Amir K), into its dark depths, the team is interrupted by word that the government has pulled all archeological permits until the protests have died down. Under the shouty eye of Corporal Shadid (Faycal Attougui), the team packs up, but Nora manages to convince everybody to just send Shorty in for a few minutes. And having done so, it gets attacked by some barely seen rat-cat hybrid hellbeast. That should be that, but Michael starts to panic about the shit that will be rained down upon him if he doesn't retrieve the rover, and so do all five of our heroes end up trucking on into the pyramid, where they discover many spooky engravings, some more of the hellbeast, and an even bigger, nastier hellbeast to boot, all while piecing together enough evidence to prove Egyptian cosmology, a development that doesn't seem to seriously concern anybody, including writers Daniel Meersand & Nick Simon.

The best thing that could have happened to The Pyramid was opening just a handful of months after the largely similar (first person, underground, end up stumbling into the actual physical place where the afterlife is located) As Above, So Below, which remains one of the most infuriatingly shitty horror films I've seen in the 2010s. The Pyramid is merely bad: not doing anything acutely wrong, just sort of lying there limp,clumsily mixing its visual metaphors while relying on some hilariously bad dialogue to keep the movie on its rickety rails. Most of this falls to poor Holden, whose nearly every line functions less as "I'm saying something that I, as a person, think" than, "I'm saying something that I, as a cog in this barely-functioning machine, need to express in order to make things unnecessarily clear to the audience". Not just mythology things. Backstory between him and his daughter things, of a sort that does not matter. Like the bit where he nastily talks down her interest in extra-terrestrial life. Would you suppose that means that aliens will end up having anything to do with the rest of the movie, or at least that Nora's susceptibility to paranormal musings will come into play? You would, in that case, suppose wrong.

The one thing that The Pyramid does manage to do is set up a reliable drip of jump scares, insofar as that makes the world a better place. It also has modestly effective monster design: the more we see of the big bad boss monster, the more it looks like low-budget CGI gone amok, but the catbeasts are effectively creepy, looking just enough like real animals (kind of like if you threw some Sphynx cats into glowing green sludge) that they seem like actual perversions and not the work of an overindulged effects designer. One particular shot, with their little eyes glowing red as they chase the characters, is legitimately atmospheric and spooky in all the best ways.

So that's one 10-second shot out of 89 minutes; not the worst batting average for a horror film of this ilk. There's plenty about The Pyramid that's tedious, from its characters who are far too stupid in far too many ways to remotely convince us that they actually practice their established professions, to its jerry-rigged and clichéd escalation of tension (that is to say, it's "escalation" of "tension"), but... no, actually, it's just tedious.

3/10

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UNDER THE STREETS OF PARIS

There's no piece of crap quite as infuriating as a piece of crap that had absolutely no right to be so crappy, and as evidence I offer As Above, So Below, a film that manages to squander what should be a completely un-fuck-up-able location even in the hands of the most fumbling boob. In part, this is because of its totally pointless insistence on presenting its action in the form of found footage, and then immediately finding every possible mechanism it can to avoid the limitations of that style by equipping the entire cast with tiny cameras, so that most of the action can be presented in the form of totally unexceptional continuity editing. The other part is that the film's screenplay feels like it happened because the writers, brothers John Erick (who also directs) and Drew Dowdle, couldn't decide between ripping off The Da Vinci Code, the first two Harry Potter books, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Descent, The Divine Comedy, and Tomb Raider, and so they decided to go ahead and do all of them at once, and just for funsies, to mortar the dismal construct that resulted together with some insulting half-baked nonsense about people fighting their inner demons in what may or may not be the actual, literal Hell.

The movie's inner confusions start off early, and they start off strong, with a prologue set in Iran, where British-ish Wunderkind Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks) - who speaks seven languages and has two PhDs, and has the polished but impersonal good looks of an underwear model on top of it, all without having apparently attained the age of 30 - is hunting through a cave system that the government is about to blow up, looking for Proof. The Proof comes in the form of a giant carving of some Mespotamian animal god with carvings all over it; cautiously making sure to film all of this for later reference, she sneaks out just as the bombs start exploding, and gives us the first of many experiences we'll have with some of the most nauseating shakycam I have experienced in many a day.

The carvings turn out to be the key to translating a code used by medieval European alchemists, but as Scarlett happily tells Benji (Edwin Hodge), who is filming a documentary on her work, conveniently enough, it will translate that code into Aramaic, one of the only languages she doesn't speak. Luckily, she knows someone who does: her ex-maybe-a-boyfriend?-it's-deliberately-not-clear George (Ben Feldman, who looks even more like an underwear model than Weeks), currently in Paris breaking into old cathedrals and fixing their ancient clock towers, because that's both edgyhip and artistically sensitive all at one time. He is eager to help her translate the cryptic inscription on the tomb of French alchemist Nicolas Flamel, who supposedly discovered the secret to creating the philosopher's stone before his death in the 15th Century. And while the stone can convert any metal to gold and prolong life, Scarlett only wants it to prove her father's theories right, though what those theories might have been is left entirely as an exercise for the viewer.

So anyway, some puzzle-solving exercises later, Scarlett determines that she needs to go into the catacombs beneath Paris, which requires the aid of the urban spelunking team made up of Papillon (François Civil), Souxie (Marion Lambert), and Zed (Ali Marhyar), who really got the short end of the stick on the badass French nicknames. And into the ground all six go - George against his will and only to avoid the cops, where they pass by a corridor that Papillon insists they must absolutely not for any conceivable reason enter, because it is pure evil and everyone who frequents the catacombs knows it. So obviously they end up in that corridor, though to be fair, the film plants enough Chekhov's guns that never fire that it would be entirely rational to suppose that such an overt "the horror film part starts when we enter that particular cave" bit of foreshadowing wouldn't play out.

It is, I imagine, quite impossible to set a film in the Paris catacombs and completely mess up the sense of grim, suffocating atmosphere, and Dowdle and his cinematographer, Léo Hinstin, don't manage to do it. But fuck me, do they come close. Part of it is the original sin of the found-footage aesthetic: it's ugly. The shaking is ugly, the video noise is ugly, the color range is ugly. Part of it, and possibly even the bigger part, is that the film is surprisingly bright: considering that the only light is nominally the head lamps the six explorers are wearing, the film is full of suspiciously well-illuminated locations, even the ones that the narrative would appear to demand are completely drenched in inky, unknowable blackness. And so what ought to be the film's single biggest strength, its close, stuffy, inherently spooky location, falls completely apart.

That being said, As Above, So Below spends an heroic amount of its running time trying to do anything at all besides being spooky, enough so that I couldn't decide for the first hour if it even qualified as a horror film (in the first 30 minutes or so, before the action heads underground, the answer is plainly "hell no, it's a debased knock-off of The Da Vinci Code", and that's a book that already did a perfectly fine job of debasing itself, thank you). It's much more eager to dig into the minds of its characters, with its functional scare scenes coming in the form of surrealistic interludes where one character at a time is forced to deal with the deep secret trauma that they've been carrying around all this time, except that doesn't apply to fully half the cast, unless Benji has some dark past involving weird girls with Goth mascara who are apparently stalking him in what is by far the most annoying of the movie's undeveloped plot hooks. And even for the half to whom it does apply, they're such generic traumas, and they have happened in the past of such flimsy stock characters, that the film's passion about playing as psychodrama more than a simplistic "boo!' machine hardly seems worth it.

Every now and then, an image will manage to be creepy despite itself (mostly by virtue of being blatantly derivative of something better), and there's one sequence with Benji stuck in a tight crawlspace that manages to evoke the raw panic of being contained in someplace small and remote to absolutely terrific effect - the morbidly claustrophobic, I imagine, would be entirely incapable of handling the scene, and the rest of us get one of the genuinely terrifying moments I have seen in a movie this year. But scattered moments surrounded by bullshit plotting, bullshit characters, and bullshit filmmaking technique doesn't save a movie from being bullshit; there are a billion ways to fix the film (squelch the found footage angle, don't use "maybe it was hell!" as an excuse for dimwitted nonsensical third-act plotting, don't give the characters Dark Pasts if you can't come up with a good one), but only one way that such a terrific location could be wasted on such a weirdly overplotted, unfocused waste of time.

And by the way, figuring out a way to have your sole black character be the camera operator in a found-footage movie and still kill him off as one of the first victims? Way to play down to the genre's worst clichés, guys!

2/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: LOST AND FOUND

15 years after it was the talking point for a whole summer for both horror fans and people who did just about everything in their power to avoid horror, it's hard to judge The Blair Witch Project simply as a thing unto itself. But then again, it always was. When it was new, the film was mostly noteworthy for its extraordinarily aggressive ad campaign, including shameless TV specials promoting the wholly fictitious "true" story behind the movie, and for having what history customarily regards as the first major internet-based hype in the history of cinema advertising. These things very much tended to swamp the film in its first chance to hook up with audiences beyond the self-selecting confines of the Sundance Film Festival; and in the years since - especially since 2008 - it's had to also deal with being the progenitor of the "found footage" style of horror and, increasingly, every other genre as well, and if you can still find even a single person prone to any more forgiving judgment of that style than "considering that it was found footage, parts of it actually didn't suck", congratulations on having significantly more generous friends than I (and we must concede that the film didn't invent the found footage gimmick, though it's entirely possible that nobody involved in making it could have known that - the most important example, Cannibal Holocaust, was never a canonical film).

What's easy to forget, when "found footage" has long since come to mean "for no reason, this entire movie has been shot from the perspective of cameras, phones, security cameras, laptops, and God knows what, even when it takes entire subplots full of mountainous bullshit to keep that pointless gimmick going, I'm looking at you, Chronicle", the term actually came into being because The Blair Witch Project resembles footage, that was found. And then shown to us as evidence of what happened to the people who lost it. What was the last first-person movie to actually do that? Paranormal Activity 2? But this is not, anyway, Blair Witch's fault, any more than it would be fair to compliment it for not committing a sin that hadn't been invented yet.

What's not easy to forget, if you lived through it, is that in 1999, this gimmick was used as the basis for one of the most shameless exercises in hucksterism that modern cinema has seen, as the folks at Artisan Entertainment used an array of tools that would have made William Castle fall down on his knees in a state of religious rapture in service of convincing a surprising, and frankly alarming, number of people that The Blair Witch Project was the actual record of an actual documentary shoot that actually ended with the filmmakers actually missing and presumed actually dead. Or at least that the legend of the Blair Witch was a real piece of local folklore in the woods around the microscopic town of Burkittsville, Maryland. Neither of these facts are remotely true, which didn't stop Artisan from building the entire ad campaign around them. It worked, obviously: The Blair Witch Project was the highest-grossing independent production ever at the time of its release, and it remains the most profitable film in world history relative to its production cost.

All of this has always been enough to obscure the movie itself, whose not-inconsiderable merits are distinctly slight. The film is a spooky campfire story, pretty explicitly: the first quarter hour is spent collecting scary anecdotes from the Burkittsville populace, none of which actually clarify what the Blair Witch is, or even what the Blair Witch is perceived to be. But all of which suggest the uncanny and inexplicable in a terrifically beguiling way; without being expressly about death and danger in most cases, the stories all tell of something deeply unsettling and wrong that lives in the woods, something that you're much happier staying far away from. It's not scary, it's creepy, and a good sense of the really damn creepy is almost more pleasurable. For me, anyway; and I think the visceral division of the film into the "this is one of the scariest horror movies I've ever seen!" and "what the fuck, it's just a bunch of sticks!" camps is based on entirely that difference between creepiness and scariness.

At any rate, we get all of those stories in the first act of the film, and that provides the perfect backdrop for the rest, in which three student filmmakers - director Heather Donahue, sound recordist Mike Williams, and cameraman Josh Leonard (all three characters sharing the name with their actors) - go into the Burkittsville woods to make their documentary, from which those creepy interviews all came. We know, from an opening title card, that none of the three came out of the woods, nor was any trace found of them besides their footage, and that adds a pungent sense of doom to the footage, some of it clumsily assembled by barely-trained nonprofessionals (the three actors did virtually all of the filmmaking themselves), much of it hilariously overwrought - as a director, Donahue is much more excited about the heavy use of menacing innuendo than anything intellectually sober - and plenty of it just plain home movies, captured on video rather than the black and white 16mm footage of the "real" movie, in which three kids fuck around aimlessly with a camera. Knowing that the trio is slated to die, or vanish, or whatever, the footage of them doing nothing remotely interesting becomes keenly fascinating, in a lightly tragic way. No subsequent film has ever gotten more mileage out of using the audience's awareness that we're watching the first-person account of a terrible (fictitious) event as an element in giving that account added depth, interest, and meaning; while most films that invent styles are notable for how primitive they are, The Blair Witch Project really is the most involving and conceptually sound found footage movie ever made.

So the three filmmakers go into the woods, Donahue doggedly insisting that she's got a plan and a map, and film some of the creepy places where the creepiest evidence of the Evil Something was found, and the lingering atmosphere of those spooky stories from the first quarter hour, along with our knowledge that something happened, cast a lovely pall over the film, which starts to resemble a spooky campfire story all by itself. And eventually, the trio's sense that something is Out There In The Woods begins to bubble up, and the cracks and rustling and footpads that happen any time you're out in the wild with deer and squirrels and all start to sound a bit more deliberate and a bit more humanoid, and that's when the little rock piles and stick figures start appearing. Along with, at night, noises that sound far too deliberate to just be nocturnal animals milling around, but also don't plausibly sound like the work of pranksters from Burkittsville, unless the entire town, babies and all, has crept into the woods just to antagonise three film students.

And it's exactly as the film starts to ramp up its paranormal activities that I find The Blair Witch Project starts to lose gas. Technical limitations have a lot to do with it: the low-fi film, aping an even lower-fi shoot (the video footage was altered in post-production to look worse, since it was meant to take place in 1994 and the quality of the digital cameras used to shoot it didn't exist at that point), isn't entirely up to the task of replicating the sounds and images that the trio hears. "Was that a baby?" they panic; "was that a cackle? What are those noises surrounding us from all sides?" And the simple fact is that it's hard to hear what they're hearing through the puffy static: there' noise and sticks cracking, all right, but the implicit sense of overbearing sound from all sides of the dark woods isn't there for us. The lengthy stretches of pitch black footage, sometimes with charcoal grey figures moving around in it, doesn't accurately mimic the human eye's ability to see in even the darkest night outdoors. That the actors, given no sense of what the filmmakers were going to do to torment them during the weeklong camping trip/film shoot, are authentically scared, and a lot of that bleeds off the screen. But the specific stimuli that freak them the hell just doesn't always translate.

Then there's the other thing, the frequent complaint that the film just depicts three idiots wandering around the woods, lost. Which it does, and they are: not that any of us know what it's like to be trapped in a forest with a malevolent inhuman entity, but the students' basic wilderness survival skill set is abysmally low, yet high enough that they never risk starving to death on a trip that ends up taking twice as long as they'd planned for. And after the halfway mark, the film undeniably gets repetitive: walk around all day, the boys getting increasingly angry towards Donahue, who responds by being haughty and defensive, see a couple of things that are inexplicable and weird and creepy, and then endure noises and tent-shaking at night. One gets the impression that the film could have gone on for six hours or stopped at the 50-minute mark (it is, instead, 80), without having meaningfully changed the rhythm of the daily storytelling formula. That it descends into backbiting and frantic shouting I do not hold against it: the three actors are responding in the way that I think most of us would, both to the events within the film and to the stressful way that the film was made. That it does so in a redundant way is unforgivable.

At any rate, enough of this transpires eventually that the film shifts into its honestly confusing final sequence, in a spooky old building deep in the woods, and the cinematography starts to become infamously shaky (though, with a generation of shakycam features descended from it, The Blair Witch Project honestly looks mostly sedate these days), and the film stops on a moment of startling ambiguity. The finale is, by itself, not very great, though at the point it arrives, anything that's not more "walk in the woods, fight, be scared" is welcome, and I'm tremendously glad that the film doesn't explain a goddamn thing: it just shows that whatever Evil Something has been haunting those woods is still there, and can't be explained now any more than it has been for the last 200 years. The abrupt, unforgiving way the film ends is still shocking despite all the film's imitators, and it's a strong finish to a film that spends a little too much time wandering, giving the whole thing the feeling of more impact than it might have otherwise had.

The film's chief success, though, was never going to be in the individual execution of that or this moment, but in its concept; it's gimmick, if you'd rather be harsh on the results. Director-writers Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez (who, like the actors, proved surprisingly unable to transform the film's enormous success into subsequent careers of any scale or merit) hit upon a great idea to put us, the audience, into a ghost story, something that had never been done with anything like this much success. The whole movie is built around that: the opening sequence is by far the most conventionally cinematic, giving us background so that we know what story we're going to be dropped into; the rest then shifts into raw, first-person footage that resembled nothing that mainstream filmmaking had ever scene at the time of the film's production, and the way that it feels like we're being involved in the footage, taking part in the process of discovery and forced to make the same assumptions as the characters, made for an interactive horror movie like nothing before it - and very little after it, truth be told; most found-footage movies have copied the surface of The Blair Witch Project but not the soundness of its concept nor the aesthetic cohesion of its execution. I don't know if it's my fault or the film's that I consistently lose interest in its efforts well before the end, but as a bravura concept and such a well-crafted execution of that concept that it still hasn't been improved upon, I admire it even in the moments when I'm enjoying it least.

Body Count: Maybe 3, maybe 0. No trace of them was ever found, after all.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE 21st CENTURY SLASHER

In my head, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a beloved consensus highlight of 2000s meta-horror that is well understood to be an essential work for genre fans. And maybe that's how it works in the real world, since every review I read about it seems to contain the sentiment "this is such a great film, even though nobody has ever heard of it or seen it", and all those dozens and dozens of reviewers can't have stumbled upon the same microscopic, obscure gem just like that. On the other hand, if the film's cult had any sort of heft to it at all, than producer/director/co-writer Scott Glosserman and co-writer David J. Stieve would have more (any) impressive horror films to their name since Behind the Mask hit the festival circuit in 2006, and leading man Nathan Baesel would have more credits for acting than for working in post-production on reality television shows. The universe is just a cruel prick sometimes, and so, while the dipshits behind stuff like V/H/S have an entire self-reinforcing cottage industry going on for themselves, Glosserman and Stieve, nearly a decade on, have just this one terrific little pearl of a satiric horror-comedy to their name.

But at least they have that. At least we have that. Behind the Mask isn't perfect - it has a doozy of a formal complication baked right into the concept that might not ever have been resolvable in a truly elegant way - but you sit around waiting for a perfect horror film, you starve to death. And there's plenty of outright great material generously littered throughout the film, especially in its absolutely glorious first third, when it becomes the best extant version of the self-examining meta-horror film that had become so popular in the decade following Scream. The film takes place in a universe where Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddie Krueger have actually existed to do their killing in the small towns of Crystal Lake, Haddonfield, and Springwood, information communicated to us in a breathless TV news report that turns out to be the opening scene of a documentary being pieced together by Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals), one-third of a team of graduate student documentary filmmakers (the others are Doug and Todd, played by Ben Pace and Britain Spellings in their limited onscreen appearances; I believe they are, respectively, the cinematographer and sound recordist). Their film is an investigation into the how of all these weirdly elaborate psycho killers who breed like rabbits in this universe, and to answer that question, Taylor has decided to go right to the source: Leslie Vernon (Baesel), who is building himself into the role of mysterious, possibly undead slasher monster for the little town of Glen Echo, Maryland.

The film shifts imperceptibly through two different phases in its first hour: the first part is an extravagantly funny and intelligent "behind the scenes" look into how all the contrivances and straight-up bullshit that go into making slasher movie plots actually involve a shitload of hard work and careful planning on the part of the psychos in question. Vernon is a proud nerd at heart, eager to show off his work, his research, bragging about how he's been carefully stalking his chosen Final Girl, Kelly (Kate Lang Johnson) - he prefers the term "Survivor Girl", which strikes me as the filmmakers being a little contrary just for the sake of it - making her paranoid without actually making her feel unsafe, planting clues about Glen Echo's mysterious (and partially fabricated) tragic history where he knows she'll find it, on top of doing things like working his ass off at cardio to make sure that he can run fast enough to do that "killer who only walks slowly is always just a few paces away" routine.

It's a film for and by people who understand the rules of the slasher movie very well, have some affection for the form, but also recognise that it's basically terrible. And having opened by complimenting those of us in that niche audience for our intelligence and sophistication, the film starts to get really interesting in its middle, and best third, when it ceases to be just one more post-Scream parody of slasher film tropes. Though, to be absolutely clear and absolutely fair, it is far more cutting and inventive in that vein than just about any film I've ever seen, certainly more than the Screams. Glosserman and Stieve have the knack for answering questions that we'd never think to ask, but once we see oh, that's how a psycho slasher killer would do THAT, it's clear and logical and easy to map onto the Jasons and Michaels and their numerous, less iconic brethren. Parts of Behind the Mask are just plain delightful in the way that a caper movie is delightful, as we see puzzle pieces coming into play in ways that are unpredictable and surprising and always, always rewarding.

That, anyway, is the superficial reason for loving the film. The deeper, frankly discomfiting reason, especially if you're a big slasher fan (and the movie relies on you being so, both to make its most impact and simply so that you get all the jokes), is that Behind the Mask rather craftily and invisibly turns itself around on the viewer through the form of its internal filmmakers, asking without voicing the words, "so anyway, why do you watch this shit?" There comes a point when Taylor... not exactly realises that she's filming the preparations of a terrifically friendly, funny geek who is, that night, going to murder at least seven teenagers, but more realises that she already realised it a little while ago. And then the film becomes explicitly about the ethics of filming a criminal act that the documentarian has the means to stop, but implicitly, and far more rewardingly, about the ethics of entertainment based in violent, elaborate death - something that, incidentally, Behind the Mask almost completely lacks. Only one of its fourteen actual or "what if?" deaths can be legitimately described as gory, and that's largely because it's paying off a silly one-off line about post-hole diggers from much earlier in the film.

I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still distinctly aware that I haven't unpacked everything going in on that middle chunk, as it implicates the viewer, and confounds its own status as a work of art. Vernon explains to an increasingly incredulous Taylor why all of the baroque elements of his work are necessary, how his entire focus is on empowering the Survivor Girl while also depriving her of her femininity, in terms that reek of medically outdated psychoanalytic lit theory, providing an intellectual spine for "doing slashers" that's plausible viewed from one angle, puffed-up double-talk from another; the film manages to discuss in easy, bite-sized form some of the weightier pro-horror arguments that have been offered and give them quite a bit of validation, and at the same time to make those arguments seem forced. "But aren't you really just excited to watch people die?" the film asks. "And don't you wonder if that kind of makes you a bad person?" There's even a gratuitous boob shot that's called out as gratuitous and then allowed to linger in a way that feels more self-aware and self-critical about male gazes than any other gratuitous boob shoot I've seen in a slasher movie.

The other important thing going on is that Behind the Mask really asserts itself not as a movie about the life of a slasher killer, but a movie about making a movie about a slasher killer. Between its 2006 premiere and its insultingly tiny 2007 theatrical release, the film came out too early to be consciously commenting on the "found footage" trend that exploded just a year later, though it's not really aping found footage to start with. Rather, when we see things through the camera's perspective, as we do for the great majority of the first hour, we're being put in the perspective of spectators of that footage - which is a dumb tautology, of course. Any time you watch a movie, you're a spectator of footage. But in Behind the Mask, there's not just documentary footage: the first scene, and a couple of moments dotted across the first hour, take place "outside" the documentary footage. And this makes the film different from virtually all found footage movies, where the entirety of the film takes place "within" the footage. The action of Behind the Mask takes place in a reality, and the film crew stands within that reality, filming it; when we then watch their footage, we're subtly being situated within that reality as well, since we know that the footage is a thing to be watched inside the film's universe, and we're watching the footage, and so it goes. And this makes us complicit with the film to a degree that we virtually never get to be with movies: not that we are present with the action and thus able to prevent, because that's just stupid. But because we become conspicuously aware that the footage has been made in order for us to watch it.

It's heady stuff, but it's also the direct cause of the film's greatest failure, and one that is completely inevitable. The peculiar effect of watching the footage as being separate from watching the movie only works because the film divides itself between "reality" and "filmed-reality"; but that exact same division cheapens the film. Every single time the movie shifts out of the camera's perspective into a more normal "horror movie" aesthetic (it's completely open about this, the lighting and video quality both dramatically change, and there's suddenly a musical score) it's jarring and feels somewhat arbitrary. To me, anyway. And then we come to the last third, when Taylor, finally thrown into moral awakening, aware that abstracting this killer's actions through the lens of cinema has been a tool to remove herself from the ramifications of filming and watching those actions, announces that the documentary is over - and just like that, the documentary is over. The rest of the film plays out in the top-level reality of polished lighting, classical visual vocabulary, and ominous music. It moves through the third act of every single slasher on the books, and let me be frank, it moves through that act beautifully. As a conventional slasher film, the last third of Behind the Mask is really one of the best out there. But it's also a conventional slasher film.

I truly don't think there was a way to "solve" that, so I'm not harping on the filmmakers for not doing it. The end of Behind the Mask is a logical and inevitable extension of everything that was set up before: countless little Chekov guns fire off, and there's one piece of foreshadowing that pays off because it specifically wasn't mentioned, which is a really awesome way of teasing the viewer's genre savviness (I don't want to give away things, so I'm putting it in spoiler bars, in all his chatter about gender metaphors, Leslie conveniently fails to mention to Taylor that the increasingly masculine Final Girl tends to have an androgynous name, something Kelly lacks). But after the complexity, the wit, and the astonishing versatility of Baesel's performance, veering from giddy enthusiast to unexpected sorrow and introspection to dead-eyed menace, even a very good conventional slasher ending feels like it's letting all the air out of a movie that has been, till that point, one of the boldest examinations I know of what viewers demand of the narrative, of the characters, and of themselves as they watch horror movies. It has a fine ending, but nonetheless a disappointing one.

But then it goes ahead and resolves its plot during the end credits: not a little bonus, but an actual scene without which the narrative of the whole is, though satisfying, literally incomplete. And so, having once again bent the reality of "what is the 'actual' movie and what isn't?" one last time - and with a Talking Heads song, on top of it! - the film gets itself back in my good graces for its final bow.

Anyway, it's funny, it's legitimately tense, and it's smart as all hell, and it's one of my favorite American horror movies of the 21st Century. Not a lot of competition for that title, we all understand, but a damned impressive film anyway, and badly in need of a bigger fanbase and more love until that glorious day when it finally asserts its birthright as a modern horror classic.

Body Count: 10, three of whom are also seen in a theoretical "what if they died this way?" flashforward. Also one person who dies in the same theoretical flashforward, but not in "reality".

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ECHO... ECHO... CHO... O

It's so easy to compare Earth to Echo to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial that it would feel disingenuous not to. Both are about children from suburban subdivisions encountering an extra-terrestrial being; both are metaphors for the experience of being a child in a subdivision, though here things start to break: E.T. is about childhood isolation and friendlessness, while Earth to Echo is about kids who already have friends - in fact, it splits protagonist duties three ways - and the alien serves as a metaphor for their awareness that in the next few days, they'll all be living in different states. And while E.T. uses the relationship between boy and alien as a very clear, very moving organising metaphor, Earth to Echo is sloppy and muddy and it is a metaphor for an emotional process more because the movie says it is, than because it has done the necessary work to prove it.

Although, the point remains that it at least attempts to have that kind of metaphor, and that makes it better than a lot of kids' movies, which seem at best to have a fairly patronising, if not altogether hate-filled attitude about kids. For all its litany of failures at cinema and as a narrative, Earth to Echo at least manages to treat with all due dignity the dramatic conflict about three boys (it's incredibly difficult to tell from the material presented onscreen if they're meant to be young high schoolers or old middle schoolers) who are convinced that life itself is about to end because they're apart to have the first major social separation of their young lives. At no point does the film ever condescend to this theme: it presents it with the autumnal sorrow that a chaos-ridden teen might actually feel in the face of such a life-altering event, and refuses to bring a grown-up perspective to the characters' lives. And for this, at least, I admire it, since I have the feeling that I need to admire it for something.

The film takes the shape of a documentary made after the fact by one of the main participants, the camera-addicted Tuck (Brian "Astro" Bradley). Which means, yes, it's another one of those damn first-person movies (by this point, the description "found footage" no longer feels correct enough to use), though one that at least preemptively explains why the characters lug cameras around all the time. Initially, Tuck wants to film an agitprop piece about the freeway construction project about to destroy the Nevada community where he and his friends live; this eventually turns into an exposé of the conspiracy to find and detain an extraterrestrial, with the construction project a pretext to clear out an area where the alien's ship appears to be buried. But that suggests that Earth to Echo has a much more definitive, sturdy shape than it actually does: it actually plays as a series of fetch quests, with Tuck and his two BFFs, Alex (Teo Halm) and Munch (Reese Hartwig), using their smartphones, all of them weirdly garbled but depicting what look like maps, to find, first, a small alien being the size of a squirrel that communicates only in beeps - they name it Echo and decree it to be a male - and then to find the pieces of metal that he can manipulate using telekinetic powers into parts to rebuild his spaceship, which beggars all my comparative skills by being, in fact, about the exact size of a breadbox. Along the way, the trio picks up a girl, Emma (Ella Wahlestedt), and there is some hint of class resentment between her and Alex, in addition to the expected adolescent sexual tension, though perhaps realising that they're making a children's movie, in the United States, the filmmakers drop that theme after its first appearance.

The film gains absolutely nothing from its first-person aesthetic, and there's at least a few minutes of Echo POV footage that straight-up defy the explanation we've been given for that aesthetic, but the style is at this point too entrenched to die for at least a few more years, so the best thing to do is to grit your teeth and ignore it, rather than try to logic it out, I've long since decided. Take that away, and Earth to Echo is a perfectly ordinary attempt at "doing a Spielberg", done with a perfectly satisfactory if derivative story by Henry Gayden & Andrew Panay, and noticeably droopy direction from Dave Green, all of them making their feature debuts. If the film has a problem, instead of at least a handful, it's that the filmmakers are willing to let clichés do the work for them, even when that makes no sense: the character of Munch is written with the peculiar interests and awkward social tendencies of the Fat Kid, given a Fat Kid name, and Hartwig is directed to play the Fat Kid body language, despite not actually being fat. That's an extreme, but every characterisation seems to have been imported without change from the Big Book of Kids' Adventure Movie Templates, especially the deeply thankless figure of the Token Girl. I'll cop to respecting the filmmakers for making the vaguely nerdish Tuck black, and not having that be an important or commented-upon detail, but just something in the background.

The stock characters are really more a symptom than anything, though, of a certain slack, "let's get through this, already" attitude to storytelling that pervades everything. Echo, looking like a cross between the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans and a Disney rodent, is fairly adorable, and used just sparingly enough to remain special throughout the movie, but it's a film otherwise devoid of creative, impressive visuals (that's the damn first-person gimmick for you, ain't it?), and there's no real emotional depth to it, no point where the film reaches inside your chest and wrings your heart. No matter how many times Halm looks distraught and wan, the film never makes the case for what this story actually means to the characters, and only the framing drama of the impending move really gives Earth to Echo much of any heft, while it fails to inform most of the central 45 minutes whatsoever. It's that peculiar hollowness that makes the film so aimless, even more than the copycat story and dramatis personae. Green and company know the notes from looking at the films of their own childhood, but they don't have the soul to play them right, and while the film is a perfectly sound waste of 89 minutes, I can't imagine anyone in years to come ever regarding it as a precious relic of their youth.

5/10

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PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

We must say this for The Quiet Ones: it's not lazy. As befits the august brand name of Hammer Film Productions, it is an attempt to do something with the most bland, generic gimcrackery of contemporary horror cinema, rather than simply giving into clichés and marketing concerns. It is idea-driven, rather than incident-driven, and it baldly asks complicated, unresolvable questions about how we know what we know, and what intellectual humility should attach itself to scientific progress. As a cinematic construct, it puts in a striking attempt to do something with the "looking through a camera and recording horrifying stuff" that, as far as I know, has never been done or even come close to being done in the way it is here. It is classy and restrained, with some of its tensest moments punctuated by a slow, confused release that comes when, despite the characters' (and the well-trained audience's) best expectations, there isn't a screaming nightmare beast jumping into frame from a dark corner. All in all, the film could be quite a great piece of genre work, except for the critical fault that it just isn't very successful at any of its high-minded ambitions.

After some reflection, I'm convinced that has a lot to do with the structure of the thing. The story - under the usual dubious "inspired by a true story" banner (among other small details, both the year and the continent have been changed) - takes place in and near Oxford, England, in 1974, where bossy professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) has assembled a small team to help him with a kind of paranormal investigation: his student-lover Krissi Dalton (Erin Richards), her other lover and fellow student Harry Abrams (Rory Fleck-Byrne), and Brian McNeil (Sam Claflin), who isn't a student at all, but an employee of the Oxford audio-visual department, hired on to film the proceedings. Those proceedings are all about the gaunt, mentally unwell Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), who suffers from what any normally superstitious person would identify on the spot as a demonic possession, but Coupland has other ideas: he's convinced that Jane simply has an excess of undigested emotional trauma from a past she can't consciously access, and all the supernatural things going on around her are solely the result of her overabundance of negative energy. His hope is that by curing her and proving himself right, he can cure all mental illness and "ghosts" in the world in one go.

For reasons that are decently plausible, this investigation ends up needing to take place in a rickety old house in the country that damn well ought to be haunted, and the creepy surroundings, coupled with the isolation, ends up making everybody pretty miserable, except for Coupland himself. The experiments seem to be heading in no direction at all, but it's increasingly clear, that, if nothing else, something is wrong with Jane, and it's starting to get a lot worse, and a lot stronger.

So, what was I talking about, when I mentioned the structure? Simply this: the film is a combination of footage from Brian's camera, and ordinary third-person filmmaking, and despite everything I'm about to say, the movie earns this much praise: it's not capricious or arbitrary in the shift from one perspective to the other. The Quiet Ones is mostly not about the existence or not of ghosts, or telekinesis, or whatever other spookiness attends to the plot: mostly, it's about the limitations of perception and the way that our understanding of the truth is filtered through what we see and recognise. Director John Pogue and his collaborators have clearly put some thought into how they can best explore that by defining the limitations of first-person storytelling and breaking out of it when necessary, with the film cleaving neatly into portions where the presence of the camera augments our sense of what's going on and what we're not seeing. The problem is that the film so obviously flaunts this very central element of its construction that the whole thing feels like a metanarrative game, a postmodern riff on horror rather than an actual expression of horror. Watching the film feels like looking through an increasingly diffuse series of plastic blocks, with the actual content trapped beneath one too many layers of separation that, while it might be intellectually sound, is utterly deadening on both dramatic and generic levels. The film manages at times to be effectively creepy - and I've already mentioned how cleverly the filmmakers indulge in scenes that lead up to jump scares that don't end up happening, giving the film a taut, unresolved feeling that works in its favor. But the whole thing is so beholden to alienation effects that it's really hard to ever care - and that's deadly for building scares.

Inasmuch as the film clings together at all, it's almost solely because of Harris, whose brusque, short-tempered academic know-it-all is a flawless depiction of a certain kind of bullying smugness, wholeheartedly convinced of its own all-round righteousness. And this is only sharpened when Coupland's theories are as specious, and as obviously wrong, as The Quiet Ones consistently depicts them as being; in the final act, as one of several howlingly ill-advised shock revelations, the committee-written script (Pogue, Craig Rosenberg, and Oren Moverman adapting a script originally by Tom de Ville) gives Coupland a reason for being so ruinously fixated on his pet theories and the ad hoc methods he uses to test them, but the film is far better when he's just a tenured jerk drunk on the ability to do whatever he wants and have admiring students line up to be abused and exploited by his bellowing refusal to even consider other ideas besides the ones he's chosen.

When it's primarily about the three people (four, if we count the not-quite-there Jane; Cooke's performance is the film's second-best as surely as Harris's is the best, though with much more of a stock figure to play) being caught up in Coupland's falling-apart theories, The Quiet Ones damn near works as a horror-tinged chamber drama; when it is about spooky, underlit houses with inexplicable goings-on - and it becomes this more and more as it progresses - it's merely adequate at best, and frequently not even that. There's a pervasive sense that it hadn't all been worked out quite when the script was finished, and the pacing is off, the parameters of the plot seem to keep shifting when we're not looking, and I really can't say enough bad things about the last 10 minutes and the revelations included in them. I admire the notion behind The Quiet Ones, and I'm glad that the rebuilding Hammer would rather make this kind of conceptual horror than the utterly dismal found footage junk food that dominates the genre nowadays; but we don't give out points for effort here, and whatever merit the idea has, the execution leaves everything to be desired.

5/10

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STRIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION

There have been a fair number of reviewers comparing Devil's Due with Rosemary's Baby, which is fair on the grounds that none of the glut of "pregnant with Satan's baby" movies made in the intervening 46 years have penetrated remotely as far into the cultural consciousness; but subgenre is absolutely the only the thing that the two have in common, and trying to use the one as a measuring stick for the other is gravely insulting. Rosemary's Baby, one of the great horror films of the 1960s, is above and beyond all its paranormal activity, a psychological portrait of a pregnant woman terrified by the strange and unpleasant changes her body is undergoing. It is terrifying not because of devil worshipers and demonic rape, but because of the realisation that something foreign is growing and thriving within one's own body, and all the people who should be there to help provide stability and support - spouses, kindly old friends and neighbors, doctors - are either indifferent or part of the problem. It is a film about Rosemary. Whereas Devil's Due spends virtually its entire running time alienating and Othering its pregnant woman, and if the 1968 film has frequently been described as a metaphor for depression and resentment during a rough pregnancy, the new movie is almost its polar opposite: a metaphor for young husbands finding their pregnant wives' bodies to be disturbing and unknowable and gross.

That's only one of the three big symbolic takeaways I get from the movie, which also presents the arguments that white newlyweds should stay the hell out of the Dominican Republic, where everybody is out to get you; and that vegetarians shouldn't get pregnant. Maybe not seriously that last one, but it's definitely on the table. Anyway, the movie opens with the marriage of Zach (Zach Gilford*) and Samantha (Allison Miller), whose ages aren't entirely clear, though they're both probably just on the frontside of 30. Their honeymoon is in Santo Domingo; here, they take the advice of a sinisterly friendly cabbie (Roger Payano) about this fun underground club to go to, and it is at this point that they are drugged and Sam is subjected to some manner of ritual. Back in the States, they find out that she's pregnant, and are all prepared to celebrate (even though Sam's very first reaction is confusion why her birth control failed), but they didn't see that ritual footage that we did, and they don't know that Sam's pregnancy is not at all something to be excited for, and it's a long time until Zach finally decides to go back and look at is his home movies to start putting the pieces together, to figure out why his wife is getting so weird.

*Sigh* yes, the home movies. Devil's Due, as a horror film released in January, is naturally a camcorder-type movie, though not since Chronicle in 2012 has any such first-person movie suffered so badly for its style. I will not say "found footage", since Devil's Due plainly isn't: the "cops found this footage" conceit that allows movies like The Blair Witch Project and the first Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield to sell the idea that we're watching the real footage of something that actually happened has been treated with increasingly less rigor through the passing years, but few movies scuttle it so thoroughly as this. It's explicitly the case that the footage could never be found - the penultimate scene clarifies in dialogue that much of the footage we've just been watching was taken without a trace. The only people who'd be likely to see the movie we just saw would be the Satanists themselves, and if I thought that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had that kind of sneaky audience-implicating in mind, I'd be dazzled by the bravura of it, but that is so clearly not the case - just like Chronicle, the camera-eye view is treated more as an obstacle to be overcome than a tool for storytelling, raising the question of why not just scrap it altogether, cut out the three scenes whose single function was to explain why cameras ended up where they did, and just make a damn normal Satan baby movie.

It's not like realism, the only plausible justification for found footage movies in the first place, can be at play. Unlike virtually everything else in the subgenre, Devil's Due includes not one but two fairly recognisable actors from TV, Friday Night Lights's Gilford and Lost's Sam Anderson as a priest, and the successful construction of a faked reality through found footage cannot survive the slightest possibility that the audience is going to recognise the actor. Movies that openly proclaim their fictionhood don't have a similar limitation. And that, coupled with the torturous need to justify the cameras, makes Devil's Due as complete a conceptual wreck as any film in its style has been yet.

But that's not even what ruins it. It's lousy horror, wrapped around a pair of utterly banal characters played by actors who can't between the two of them muster up more than one scene that makes them feel like interesting humans whose travails are worthy of our time and attention. And for as much time as the movie takes to pay off its early Satanic ritual (it's over an hour through the 89-minute film until anything meaningfully tense happens), we spent a lot of time with Zach and Sam, going through the business of being young, married, and expecting. I cannot imagine anyone finding this to be anything but the most tooth-grinding tedium unless they were themselves in the exact same situation, and of course people expecting their first child are close to the last natural audience for a film built on this premise.

Eventually, a decent scene crops up (the couple are confused by the secretive, dismissive behavior of their new obstetrician), and by virtue of copying the basic "stalking through an underlit building with evil silhouettes" structure of other movies, the finale has some kind of energy to it, though I cannot imagine any horror lover ever being hungry enough that it would be worth the wait to get to this middling climax. Which is, besides, terribly busy and chaotic and difficult to parse, visually, much as was the case with the directors' concluding segment in the anthology film V/H/S. The whole thing is a glacial, visually illiterate slog, and as reward for making it through, the film just sets up a totally unnecessary sequel. Which, I hope and pray, will be called Devil's Deux, or else it will be an even more complete waste.

2/10

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MARKING TIME

Spinoff my balls: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones belongs firmly in the mainline continuity of a franchise that now reaches its fifth entry in the most pandering and condescending way I can imagine. Latinos are a reliable audience for this franchise? Then throw some Latinos at it. Incomprehensibly-written demons don't care what skin color you have.

In truth, The Marked Ones is something of a return to grace for the series, which had been steadily worsening all though way through to Paranormal Activity 3 in 2011, but only ran aground on Shit Island with the fourth entry in 2012. I don't know if it's quite the case that The Marked Ones is back up to the level of quality represented by PA3, and I don't know if it would be the case if that was really a good thing anyway. What I do know is that in its clumsy, obvious way, The Marked Ones is openly trying to be a scary movie, and all things being equal, I do tend to prefer horror films that make an attempt to be scary over horror movies that all excited about collating the narrative details of the films preceding them.

Certainly, the kind of scares to be had here are of an entirely reductive sort, but that will happen with fifth films: the camera moves here, it's empty, it moves to a close-up of the mildly confused protagonist, it moves back only this time somebody is standing in shot as wasn't there before! Accompanied by a noisy musical sting or clanging sound effect, things that typically cannot be incorporated into the nominally real and entirely diegetic onscreen world of found-footage horror movies, though bless me if The Marked Ones doesn't think long and hard about making that leap. For a franchise whose creepiness bona fides have relied primarily on slow builds and letting the viewer soak in the frame, this film is awfully dependent on stock-issue jump scares. Which, I can never emphasise this enough, is more than PA4 had going for it, so congratulations to writer-director Christopher Landon (who's had his hands in every Paranormal Activity since the second one): he knows how to make a mechanically functioning movie, which is apparently something we can't take for granted now.

This newfound love for jump scares comes hand-in-hand with the other big aesthetic leap in this movie, which is a charmingly optimistic way to phrase it. This is the first Paranormal Activity to largely eschew the static camera looking at a room style in favor of handheld consumer-grade cameras being shakily carried around by the main characters, the dominant mode of pretty much every found-footage movie outside of this franchise. Which is maybe what is meant in calling this a "spin-off", though I think structural niceties are probably not what Landon or series guardians and producers Oren Peli and Jason Blum had in mind. If the result is that The Marked Ones is, in a walk, the laziest and most generic of the Paranormal Activities, it also doesn't reach the frustrating depths of the last two.

The plot, anyway, takes us to the summer of 2012, in a predominately Latino neighborhood of aouthern California. Here, recent high school graduate Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and his best friend, the affably dopey Hector (Jorge Diaz) spend their days goofing off and recording all of it, because why not, and through all the dipshittery, we get just enough hints that Jesse's downstairs neighbor, an older woman named Anna (Gloria Sandoval), is generally regarded in the community as a witch to give us a good sense of where the plot is going. Sure enough, she ends up dead at the hands of local good boy-turned-bad Oscar (Carlos Pratts), who leaves just enough breadcrumbs for Jesse, Hector, and the vaguely defined Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh) - I think she's somehow related to Jesse, but I wouldn't swear to that in a court of law - to start piecing things together when Jesse starts having weird dreams and begins to experience unexplained phenomena, like bite marks, levitation, and random flashes of demons from out the blackest Hell.

After the complicated plot developments in PA4 (and really, PA3, but in retrospect they weren't so brutalising then), the generic simplicity of this (teen is possessed by witch; other teens try to help him; they fail, because Paranormal Activity ceases to function as a franchise if significant percentages of the named characters survive to the end of an individual feature) is honestly refreshing, even if The Marked Ones serves its duties as a nonsensical chunk of mythology in a franchise that was at its best when it was plainest by introducing every overweening screenwriter's favorite, time-travel. Which gets its first of, I have no doubt, many workouts in a final scene that commits the cardinal sin of using fanboy-pandering coolness as a panacea for a lack of the kind of drama so taut and well-conceived that it can generate a logical, satisfying ending.

But that's not a rabbit hole with going down. The elegant sparsity and quiet of the first Paranormal Activity is long gone, and if jangling noise is going to be all we get to replace it... well, at least The Marked Ones progresses cleanly through the first 75 minutes of its plot. There's nothing fresh or rejuvenating here: the Latino angle is clearly a marketing gesture that does not meaningfully inform anything but the accents and the replacement of "witch" with "bruja" in dialogue; also, the requisite superstitious old Colorful Ethnic Lady is a grandma, not a maid, which makes her at least marginally less problematic of a representation (also a mind-melting "You're like Sherlock, holmes" joke that only a white dude would have ever though might be worth writing). But this is the typical January horror movie version of a frozen dinner: something that you ingest entirely because you know it's not going to be very good, and therefore do not run the risk of having your expectations thwarted. It yells "boo", you jump, you forget about it, and at least it's not actively painful in the process. This got the coveted The Devil Inside release slot, after all.

4/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: TAPED OVER

V/H/S/2 begins with a scene of a seedy private eye (Lawrence Michael Levine) recording two people about to have sex in a hotel room. This event does not inform anything in the rest of the movie; it doesn't even introduce us to the character of the P.I., who'll be more formally set-up in the very next scene. But it does permit us to have a shot of tits being fondled within the first 30 seconds of the movie, and anyone who cherished the first V/H/S can tell you, tawdry high-school jock levels of respect for women are the beating heart of this horror omnibus series.

Or not, actually. The overwhelming theme of the first movie - all women are castrating she-demons - puts in not the whisper of an appearance in this sequel, and besides that first shot in the framing narrative, there's only one other snippet of (hugely gratuitous and objectifying) nudity in any of the four short films making up this anthology picture. Which is already enough to put V/H/S/2 at least half a step up from its forebear, an impression cemented when the third segment proves to be of such astronomically higher quality than anything else in either of the film that it manages completely by itself to hoist the movie over the line separating "probably nobody needs to ever see this" from "horror fans should probably see this, but maybe not anybody else". At this rate, I expect V/H/S/3 to nail the elusive "if you can't come up with any better way to spend your time, it's okay" threshold, and then we'll have ourselves a movie.

Anyway, the film takes the general form of its predecessor, a mysterious old building with a staticky TV surrounded by many VHS tapes. Or perhaps we should call them V/H/S tapes, a subtly different format for which it makes sense that visibly modern digital footage should have ended up on clunky slabs of black plastic. P.I. Larry and his assistant-girlfriend Ayesha (Kelsy Abbott) have been hired to find a missing college student, and have gone to his last place of residence to find him. Nobody seems to be there - emphasis on seems, as the human figure appearing and disappearing in the background of shots makes clear - and as Larry snoops around looking for clews, Ayesha starts digging through the tapes to find out if they contain any information. Thus does she find footage of their missing student (L.C. Holt), prattling on about the order that the tapes must be watched in, and how it does something to your head. Intrigued, Ayesha starts to watch the tapes, all of which contain documents of unexplained phenomena out in the world.

There's no real consistent quality to the four segments - five, if we count that wrap-around "Tape 49" (which theoretically means that this film takes place earlier than the last; the frame narrative there was "Tape 56"), written and directed by series mastermind Simon Barrett, one of the leading lights in modern indie horror (he also wrote the, in my opinion, wretchedly overrated You're Next). This is to be expected of anthologies, of course. The aggregate quality is still higher than V/H/S, though the gap between high and low is wider. The first segment, at any rate, is promising-ish: "Phase I Clinical Trials", written by Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard (of... You're Next), starring Wingard as a man with a terrible eye injury that makes him the perfect candidate for a new artificial eye. Which oh-so-conveniently has a recording chip in it. Anyone who's seen the Hong Kong horror film The Eye, its dreadful American remake, or just about anything, really, can see where this is headed: our hero can now sometimes see ghosts, and they are not at all friendly. Eventually, he crosses paths with a woman with artificial hearing (Hannah Hughes), who knows quite a lot more than he does, including the fact that you can make the ghosts scatter by having sex in front of them, an excuse for a boob shot so hilariously contrived that I'm actually willing to concede it might be satire.

The longer it gets, and the more it tries to explain shit, the more that "Phase I Clinical Trials" starts to get weird instead of scary, but in the early going, it's actually pretty decent, creepy mixed with jump scares in a way that actually kind of works. No such muted praise applies to "A Ride in the Park", written by Jamie Nash, directed by Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez (the latter of whom got this whole game started when he co-directed the grandpappy of all "lost camcorder footage" horror pictures, The Blair Witch Project), which is an absolute dog of a short. In the woods, a cyclist (Jay Saunders) stops to help a bleeding, screaming woman (Bette Cassatt), who turns out to be a zombie. So he becomes a zombie. And so do the people who try to help him. There is nothing in this sequence that even threatens to be interesting; the brief flickers that indicate this is meant to be a comedy can be used only to justify how deeply unfrightening it is. The whole thing is filmed from a camera atop the cyclist's helmet, which gives it a feeble "YOU are the zombie!" kick, but that dies off by the first time that nothing happens for thirty seconds of static "verisimilitude". If there's any merit, it's that from a technical point of view, it's impressive how the filmmakers use sleight of hand to get their gore effects over in apparently uncut takes, but this one starts boring and gets worse, until its random birthday party massacre climax.

Things skyrocket with "Safe Haven", an Indonesian effort contributed by writer-directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans, the latter responsible for the brilliant The Raid: Redemption. It's the most pacy and plotty of the segments: a news crew manages to snag an interview with the secretive "Father" (Epy Kusnandar) of a millenarian cult. To their dismay, they find that the ticking clock happens to end at the exact time they're in the compound, and the literally apocalyptic crumbling going on around them has rather unpleasant personal ramifications. Forgive me for being vague, but it wouldn't do to spoil the surprises, which are many, and almost all wonderful (though the punchline at the very end is pretty much useless). This is by far the most imaginative of the shorts, with the most ingenious effects and, it has to be said, the flimsiest grasp of the found footage gimmick that animates the entire concept of the anthology. There are scenes which abandon it altogether, turning into a normally-edited film with barely a fig-leaf of "there's a camera here" to stitch things together. No accident that it makes the film more watchable and kinetic. It doesn't, ultimately, re-write any rules, but it offers quite a lot of energy and gory fun for those who like those things, without feeling as hamstrung as its bedfellows.

Some of that high spirit continues to the beginning of the cryptically-titled "Slumber Party Alien Abduction", which opens with a bunch of boys making a home movie about dog-eating robots, and in a flash offers the best justification for a found-footage movie in years: it's kids dicking around with a camera. The one group of people who actually would keep shooting even after some of their own start to die off, finally put front and center. And the opening few minutes, documenting pre-teen and barely-teen boys being assholes to each other, has an exquisite ring of truth; but once the slumber party tails off and the alien abduction kicks in, it becomes so noise and chaotically hand-held that it's almost impossible to follow, and from the brief snatches of aliens we see, it's just as well that we can't. Things end nastily, and because of the age of the cast, it's quite a bit more sour than in other found footage movies where things end nastily (all of them), but it caps off five minutes of such pure cinematic misery that it honestly comes as a relief when the last of the children is dead.

So that's it: one hit, one acceptable miss, one miss, and one dead-on-arrival mistake. Still a better percentage than the first movie, or most found-footage horror as a whole. It's still a hollow concept that feels more and more tired with each passing year, but at least V/H/S/2 doesn't compound its hollowness by being rancid on top of it.

6/10

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