In the meantime, with the weather like it is -- I swear to you I saw a bird egg fall out of a nest, crack open on the road, and start to boil -- I find myself seeking out the cool refuge of my air conditioned room, where there is little to do but watch movies and have staring contests with the anonymous stock photo in the portrait picture frame leaning against my wall that I never got around to putting a real picture in.
Last night, between writing about Monsters University and watching the new Matthew Lillard crime saga The Bridge, I decided to peruse the new releases on Netflix. What I came up with was the The Bay, yet another found footage horror movie about...something blurry and shaky.
Netflix: Like a boss
Viewer: Dynamic Duo (except just me)
Where to begin? Well let me first say that I thought Paranormal Activity was a complete and utter waste of time. And now that I'm looking at the cover of this movie and I see that it is somehow associated with that schlock, I am disappointed, but also not entirely surprised.
The concept is this: three years after some sort of mysterious happening in a small Maryland town on the Chesapeake on the fourth of July, we are told that enough footage and data has been collected to show us exactly what happened. So the story is told mainly from the point of view of one reporter there to document the holiday festivities, but we also get a collection of home videos, cell phone footage, somehow recorded skype and facetime conversations, and the dashboard cameras of police vehicles. (Nothing exceptionally new there.)
The timeline is a bit confusing as we jump around from the fourth of July to weeks or months prior, when strange events in the area signaled the coming disaster. The story itself is pretty original. It reminded me of a mix between Contagion and The Crazies, two movies that are, individually, better than this one. But I could almost see this working as a regular (not found footage) movie with a real budget. The scares were, for the most part, genuine. Not so much bogey men jumping out at the camera or the camera moving around way too much, although there was a fair share of that.
The acting was pretty atrocious, for the most part. My favorite -- and least favorite part -- was the bumbling policemen. There is a scene where screams are coming from a house. So one cop gets out of the car, approaches and enters the house, while the other one just sits there, nervously. When several gunshots erupt from inside the house, he shouts out the patrol car window to his partner. After a few moments of no response he figures he ought to get off his ass and, you know, see if the man whose back he's supposed to be watching is alive or not.
That was the most obnoxious bit screenwriting. I enjoy the talks between the head doctor of the local hospital and the CDC as they try to figure out what's killing everyone. And the fact that the entire disaster takes place over the course of a single day really adds to the urgency and desperation of everyone involved. At first the CDC sort of brushes off the first deaths as a contained anomaly, even as the doctor explains that they have dozens of people pouring in needing limbs amputated.
Now, I may be a complete moron, but the explanation for the disaster seemed fairly believable. A small town with a large chicken industry is accidentally pouring steroids into their water supply. This, added with some accidental toxic waste from a power plant upstream accelerates the growth of parasites that do, indeed, exist in real life. So, that whole thing could potentially happen. The leap to them eating people's organs from the inside out is a bit out there, but hey, this is a horror movie, remember? At least it makes a rational attempt at an explanation.
So overall, I thought the movie was pretty effective. I hate the found footage, shaky-cam bullshit, but just as I got past it with V/H/S, I found it mostly tolerable here as well. The scares were genuine. There's one scene where the reporter stands on the docks and just hears agonizing screams coming from all over the quiet town, as people die in their homes and in the streets. That may have been the most disturbing couple of minutes, even with the actress' brutal acting. Some of the twists are predictable, but luckily we don't really get bogged down with annoying characters that we're supposed to care about; instead we just watch this entire town devolve into chaos.
I don't really know what kind of person watches horror movies. I watch them by myself sometimes when I'm bored. But I guess if you watch them with friends or something, that's cool too. I would recommend this one, whether you drink to it or not. It's not really fun or thrilling. It's just eerie and discomforting. Which I think I like better.
Beer rating: 2/10
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