Schmollywood Babylon

JeruZalem (Doron Paz & Yoav Paz, 2015)

Alright boys and girls, I fucking love found footage movies. It’s not a guilty pleasure or something silly like that, it’s a true passion. I seriously dig this genre, and I love how it makes old worn-out stories work again, just because it’s shot from someone's point of view. The strenght of found footage, something many forget, is what my buddies Jason and Jocke pointed out: it gives the illusion that something really cool could be a true, a big “if”... and that’s the key to imagination. So I never really cared for the boring found footage haters, they can’t just see beyond their own narrow wannabe-imagination.

This genre often becomes even better when it leaves the safe environments of American suburbs and rundown asylum ruins, or even or even, it will benefit from turning away from the worst clichés and embrace the exotic. I’ve seen found footage flicks from most parts of the world, but this is the first one from Israel. The artworks makes you think of World War Z, including the title written exactly like JeruZalem - and I’m not the only one who remember the Jerusalem scenes in Brad Pitt’s underrated blockbuster. But JeruZalem is a very different kind of bird compared to World War Z. Imagine a mix of Cloverfield, possession horror and even a dash of underground terrors like The Descent - and also visually very impressive, but in the end oddly underwhelming.

It tells the story of two American tourists trapped in Jerusalem during what’s essentially is the rapture, but instead of people disappearing they turn into hellish winged demons! Everything is seen through Google Glasses - or something similar - complete with GPS, face recognition with direct link to Facebook, music and - obviously - the world’s most durable batteries. It’s a very slick movie. It actually looks great, and I actually buy the reason why these glasses are being used, even after the apocalypse have started. The movie spends a good deal of its running time getting us to know the characters, maybe a bit too much of its own good, but it never - in my eyes - becomes boring or uninteresting. The characters are believable in their own silliness.

So how’s the horror? It’s… good. Not great, but competent. I was slightly disappointed you get to see so little of the mayhem, which could be a budgetary reason, but even even with several nice demon attacks, a Kaiju big demon (maybe Lucifer himself?) wandering through the city and random panic and chaos you never feel that punch in the belly, more a slight tickling sensation because the film is so good-looking. What JeruZalem needs is a kick in the ass to go that extra mile to deliver more violence and monsters.

BUT… it’s not a bad movie. It’s a lot of fun, the action is cool and there’s a lot of clever use of the glasses. The effects mostly looks great, including the really cool Kaiju demon (I would have loved to see a LOT more of that one!), and the ending gave me minor chills. It also uses the city of Jerusalem in an excellent, makes me wanna go there sometime, and that really adds to the production value. It won't change the world, win any Oscars or make new fans of found footage, but of us connoisseurs of the art of telling subjective cameras an a form of storytelling device this is a fun, glossy, not that original take on the found footage genre.

Digging Up the Marrow (Adam Green, 2014)

This one caught my be surprise, but after doing some research I felt I gotta see it. Thank Satan it didn't take long for it to be released after I discovered it, and here it is: Digging Up the Marrow, the new horror film from director and writer Adam Green. To be honest, between us, I never been a fan of Adam Green's work. Not that he seems like unsympathetic guy - quite the opposite, I just didn't connect to the Hatchet movies as well as some of my fellow horror fans out there. But I really love Frozen, a brilliant piece of thriller/drama, simple yet effective. That was my favorite one… until now.

Adam Green is a director of horror movies and that means he have a loyal fan base who he interacts with. One day an elderly man, Dekker (Ray Wise) contacts him and claims monsters are real. Green and his photographer Will seeks out old Dekker and interviews him, let him show all his sketches of the monsters and tell the story of...The Marrow, a series of underground metropolises, where human monsters live after being rejected from society (Nightbreed, anyone?) But is Dekker really telling the truth? Or is he just making things up to get some attention, to cope with the loss of an eventual son? But Green can’t let it go, and one night - at what Dekker claims is one of many entrances to The Marrow - the caught something one tape, and then it’s just impossible to back away!

Digging Up the Marrow is a mockumentary, and spends a considerable time building up the story, setting the characters - and sometimes pads the running time with some stuff that really doesn’t matter in the end - but I can buy that, because that’s documentaries to me, sometime you need to find a story in something that’s not from the beginning is a story. So in that way Digging Up the Marrow is more realistic than others in the same genre. This is a monster movie, but it’s carried by Adam Green and Ray Wise in many ways. You could call it a vanity project for Green, he’s the writer, director and star - but truth be told, he also gives us a good performance, showing both weaknesses as a human being and celebrity, a sense of being rejected when he finds out Dekker have gone to every other horror director in LA first, before catching Green on the hook.

It reminds me of the criminally underrated Incident at Loch Ness (2004), where writer Zak Penn both makes a horror movie, mockumentary and spoofs his own Hollywood-persona. That one and Digging could be a nice double feature actually. But like with Loch Ness and Werner Herzog, Digging Up the Marrow have it’s own scene stealer, and that’s Ray Wise - who’s absolutely stunning as the slippery, not-always-so-trustworthy Dekker. There’s especially one scene, during an interview, when he’s wickedly eerie. And isn’t it odd his character took (which is hinted at) a name, Dekker, so similar to David Cronenberg’s character in Nightbreed, Decker?

So how about the monsters? Let me put it like this: it’s awesome, so fucking awesome, but you wanna see more. I really wanted to see much more! But hey, that might also be good, because now it’s triggered my imagination so much I can’t stop myself from analyzing the mythology and creating my own stories, which might be the best rating a movie like this could get. The more I think of it the better it get and I need to watch it again soon, just because it’s so ambitious and sometimes quite scary - which is rare nowadays.

Digging Up the Marrow is an original piece of mockumentary/fake footage, a bit too talky at times, but the emotional quality is there and the monsters are awesome. It’s a great movie and it will probably land on my list of the best genre films of 2015! I really, really, really hope Adam Green and his colleagues will expand this movie, either with a sequel, a web series or hell, even a comic book. I just want to know more.

Please, Mr Green. Please?

The Human Centipod Episode 16: Sound Footage

So here it is, episode 16, where Fred and Jason are guested by Joachim Andersson to talk about the phenomena of the Found Footage genre. It's origins, the good and the bad, and also serving up a few recommendation to help you avoid the pitfalls of found footage . And remember to join our page on Facebook for more discussions and awesome facts!

Day of the Mummy (Johnny Tabor, 2014)

I’m drawn to bad movies like flies to cow shit. I’m not necessary saying Day of the Mummy is a bad movie, but every comment on the net hints at that and the presence of a tired looking Danny Glover just puts more wood on the fire. I’m also a huge fan of Dawn of the Mummy, the best photo models in peril-film ever made, at least together with Jungle Warriors and Ratman, and Day of the Mummy at least sounds like a sequel to Frank Agrama’s classic saga of zombie-mummies (so-called “zumies”) eating stupid americans. I’m also a fan of found footage films. This isn’t one of those, but 98 % of the film is seen from the Google Glasses-ish of the hero - so I hereby once again claim that “fake footage” is the best umbrella to gather all these productions under.

Jack Wells, listen to that name. Yeah, it’s a typical hero-name and this time it’s William McNamara (you know, who at a young age died a very violent death in Dario Argento's Opera?) who gets the honor of doing yet another Indiana Jones-esque character. We first meet him in bed with two chicks, but the entertainment won’t last long for him when Danny Glover (I call him that, even if he’s suppose to play a character he just is a very bored and uninspired Danny Glover) calls him and gives him a mission: to find a valuable stone (the Codix Stone), hidden in the tomb of some ancient Egyptian emperor who everyone - as usual - thinks just is a legend. To his help he gets these fancy glasses and Danny Glover constantly talking in his ear. They go to Egypt, puts together a team and then heads for the suspected site of the tomb...and find it, of course, and then they get stuck inside the systems of tunnels...and something, or someone, is in there… and is out after their blood!!!

Alright, what to say about this fucker? After watching so much dreck in my life I have a high tolerance level and I can understand how a movie was made and how it was meant to be. Day of the Mummy is a low-budget, cheap and not especially well-written (please let me write it next time, production companies out there!). But the nice locations, the likable cast and the short running time - under 80 minutes - makes it more entertaining than it should be. I like all movies set underground and Day of the Mummy have it’s fair share of running in underground tunnel, ducking for falling stones and strange mystic tablets with cryptical hieroglyphs carved upon them.

That’s sometimes enough for me.

While the budget makes the movie suffer, it’s clearly just a cool tunnel they’ve found somewhere and it’s has very little Egyptian artifacts or cool sets for example, the pace when they finally find the tunnels and tomb is pretty good and it ends up with an aggressive mummy who both looks very cool and very corny at the same time. Like the dude in Amazing Stories episode Mummy Daddy (but that mummy looks scarier when thinking about it….) or maybe the cool sequence in Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork. I just wish they’ve spent some time giving us more gore. It’s not completely bloodless, but it’s far from what you expect from a modern horror/adventure movie.

The worst thing is actually Danny Glover. He’s a good actor and seems to be a fantastic human being looking at the work he does on the side, but here...oh boy, he’s BORED out of his mind. He just saw the script, realized he could shoot the scenes in a few hours, maybe in his own home office, and that’s it. Take the paycheck and leave. The thing is that his character, like it is now, isn’t really needed. He’s just annoying staring at us from the bottom left side of the screen, feeding the hero with empty dialogue and grumpy old man shenanigans.

I gotta give it to the filmmakers; it might be stupid, silly, sloppy...but Day of the Mummy is an entertaining, unpretentious romp. With or without Danny Glover.

The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011)

When I was younger I had an interest in urban exploring. Not anything extreme - and not to tight spaces either, I suffer from a splash of claustrophobia. UE is quite far from being just another game, I see it as a way to look into yourself by visiting places people haven’t been in for many years. It’s just something that needs to be done, to make yourself stronger and somehow make you analyze yourself. The problem is that I hate to get dirty, so my career in this particular hobby didn’t go that far, but I’ve seen some places you haven’t seen - I can guarantee that. Instead of doing it for real I really dig movies set in that kind of environment: Underground, Urban Explorers, Catacombs, As Above, So Below and countless of ghost-hunters-visit-a-haunted-asylum-movies. Not all of them good of course, Catacombs is terrible and Urban Explorer could have been so much better. Then we have The Tunnel.

I heard about it some years back and my pal Jocke mentioned it from time to time, but I forgot about it and it wasn’t until our annual visit to Weekend of Horrors I got reminded of it when I found a blu-ray for 9 euro. I can’t stop myself when it comes to found footage - or fake footage as I prefer to call it - and bought it. Then it took me a couple of months to actually watch it, but that’s a completely different story.

The Tunnel - or The Tunnel Movie as it’s called also - should have been called Tunnels in my humble opinion, because that’s where it’s set - in the disused tunnels under Sydney, connected to the subways and - according to the film - having shelters left from WW2. Natasha (Bel Deliá) is a journalist who’s in desperate need of a story. She fucked up the last one and now she’s on the brink to loose her career. She convinces a cameraman, Steve (Steve Davis) and his sound guy Tangles (Luke Arnold) to follow her into the tunnels to investigate the rumours about homeless people living there. Producer Pete (Andy Rodoreda) joins them to keep an eye on Natascha and the team. After some troubles getting in they start their shoot and everything goes well… until one of them suddenly disappears! Someone...or something is down there and it’s very, very hungry! Trapped down in the mazes, will they ever come out alive?

Lets talk about something many movies in this special genre forgets: backstory. When you just get thrown into something mysterious without any fucking clue why these folks are doing what they’re doing - or their reasons for doing it is extremely uninteresting - the movie will fail. That goes for every kind of movie by the way. But look at the classics: in Blair Witch they’re shooting a doc about a witch, in Borderlands the catholic church is investigate the supernatural, in Welcome to the Jungle they’re gonna solve the mystery of Michael Rockefeller. They have something important to do, they’re just not kids who’s going out to party, smoke pot and fuck in the foods - leave those awesome things to the slashers. The Tunnel is packed with backstory and it takes a while for it to get going, but that’s fine with me. That’s actually one of the things that makes it a great thriller. You care about the characters and you understand why they’re doing this.

It also have one of the best reasons for filming everything, something that’s usually a problem in fake footage films: Steve decides to roll all the time because he’s not sure if they’re allowed to do this and needs proof that he and Tangles didn’t have anything to do with it all, except being camera and sound. That’s a good reason to shoot every damn second of their adventure.

Another strong point with The Tunnel is the wonderful locations, which makes it more credible. The actors are all fine and you believe in them. When the horror finally hits it’s quite subtle but scary and very disturbing. The first shot of what’s down there is very, very creepy and shot in a way you can’t figure it out to 100%, but still get an idea of what’s eating people in the darkness.

The Tunnel might not deliver something new and unique, but it’s extremely well-made and packs a lot of tension. I loved it and consider it one of the best horror films in that controversial sub-genre called found footage.

Wer (William Brent Bell, 2013)

I like werewolf- and vampire-movies who dares to be special. How wants to be something else than just another horror movie. Wer won’t win any prizes for originality, but it’s a refreshing breeze of gory mayhem which dares to stand out a bit compared to the PG13 films out there. Because if you make a werewolf film it needs to be violent. It’s stories about the animal inside, the primitive part of us who loves the rage and the hunger. Or as in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, a symbol for either puberty or homosexuality. No matter what the werewolf myth says about us, the humanity, it’s a monster that almost every time delivers good entertainment.

I’ve only heard bad things about the director’s earlier film, The Devil Inside, so of course I was a bit skeptic regarding this - also counting it was dumped on home video without any fanfare earlier this year. But good reviews sprung up like shrooms after a rainy day on an autumn field, and I got more curious. It started a bit awkward, mostly because the German release have translated all the news graphic in the beginning of the film, which for a moment made it feel like a German film. An odd thing to do, I thought they only dubbed (aka destroyed) the films over there. But after those brief failures the film transformed into a thriller:

A team of defense lawyers and experts working on the case - who is Talan Gwynek, the man accused for murdering a family in a forest outside Paris? They dig deeper into his history and family and can it be he’s a werewolf, a real werewolf? With a set of genetics which makes him become a monster, a hairy monster. Of course shit hits the fan soon, after he escapes and takes on the police force and every human being in his path!

First of all, I’ve read several reviews where the writers are referring Wer as a found footage film, and the director himself calls it a “faux-documentary style project” in an interview, but I can’t honestly see it’s either. There’s some footage that’s take from a home video camera, some surveillance cameras and POV cameras on SWAT-style teams, but the rest… well, it’s have a documentary style, but very discreetly. There’s no cameras together with the characters, and there’s a lot of scenes where a camera team never could be able to film. My guess is that it started as a fake footage film, and then they scrapped that idea but kept the visual style.

Wer is a damn good little film. The actors, except the dude playing the wolfman, Brian Scott O'Connor, feels pretty uninterested in what they’re doing and the first half feels a bit distant, cold. Not sure how to explain it. But after we see more of Talan, a huge and tall hairy guy, it takes shape into a very intensive and action-packed horror film. The violence here is sadistic and graphic, with a lot of people getting smashed into pulp in front of the camera. Gore and blood all the way, without trying to be a splatter movie. Check the semi-boring and semi-underrated The Wolfman from 2010 for a visual reference of the violence. The monster is more human than wolf, but feels a lot scarier - and a lot grumpier than usual.

This film walks the line between generic and unique, but I think the only way for people to really, really dislike it is to listen to other people who says it’s bad. You know, like most people do. It must be hard to have no opinions of your own. But still, this film got better reviews than I expected it - considering the laziness of today’s film critics. One thing is for sure, it’s a lot of fun and brings with it some atmosphere and gore into our homes. I for one welcomes that!

Oh, and here’s a thought about the word “werewolf”. Sometimes we apply “wer” on other beings, like a “werebear” or “weredeer” etc, which means a bear or a deer is a monster. Why the hell do we call humans who are these monsters for werewolves? Shouldn’t we be werehumans? Just sayin’. Or askin’. Whatever.

Raw: Der Fluch der Grete Müller (Marcel Walz, 2013)

Last year when visiting Weekend of Horrors I met the very friendly Marcel Walz, a director who seems to be getting bad reviews at IMDB - but that just encourages me to see his movies. I mean, I’m judging the humanity by looking at the comments on IMDB, so you know what I think about those opinions. Anyway, I also bought Raw: Der Fluch der Grete Müller from him (he was friendly enough to also sign it for me) and then it took me one year to see it. I could say it was because I’ve seen too many found footage films and grown tired of the genre - but I’m not. I still love it and it surprises me how many people (aka IMDB users, and some even more incredibly lazy amateur movie critics thinking their fucking blog have some importance) can be so lazy they can’t see the excellent in movies like Borderlands and Exists. Raw is a very simplistic movie, and maybe a bit too much for its own good. But that doesn’t stop it from being pretty good.

A couple of girls goes out in the forest to shoot a documentary about Grete Müller, a witch which is said to have roamed the countryside a long time ago. The interview a local historian, interview each other about the experiences out in the nature... until one night one of them disappears. The others think she’s just gave up the project and went home - but we know what happen! Soon they’re hunted by something unknown, something that wants them to die!

It’s a bit difficult to write down a story which hardly is a story. This is a very traditional storyline with very little originality, but Walz is - even if you don’t agree with me - a fine storyteller and his talent works extremely good here. We’re talking a standard, generic found footage film which is not boring for one second. The leading actresses is good, the locations looks nice and there’s an effective mythology around the witch and the surrounding legends.

At times, and I’m completely serious, it’s actually quite creepy. I like the idea of what’s following them, it’s handled very good. We don’t see so much of it, but we can still clearly figure what the hell it is. There’s also a couple of lovely shots where this thing is visible in night shots, but no one is reacting to them. You will just see them if you look carefully.

But sure, there’s a few instances of pure stupidity. For example how the thing chasing one of the girl can miss her when she’s two meters away, on the floor in a house, filming it with her camera switched to night vision - which means there’s a light coming from it, clearly visible like a flashlight directly on the target! But directly afterwards the movie is saved by a clever idea which I always wanted to see, leading up the ambiguous ending.

Raw: Der Fluch der Grete Müller was a very nice surprise, a lot better than I ever could imagine.

The Legend of Bigfoot (Harry Winer, 1976)

My quest for finding the best Bigfoot film continues with the hilarious The Legend of Bigfoot, a documentary shot, narrated, starring and researched by the infamous hoaxer Ivan Marx, a man claiming he’s a professional tracker and Bigfoot researcher since the fifties. But to be fair, he shot the whole movie himself and the nature footage isn’t half-bad. So he had some talents. This is the story of how he found and filmed the reclusive man-ape, some kilometers from his house in 1970, and how this inspired him to solve the mystery of Bigfoot!

You know, there’s not much to write about The Legend of Bigfoot, except it’s unintentionally very very very fun. Lets take a look at the first Bigfoot footage he took, which is totally insane. It looks like a dude, quite slim, in a cheap suit, stumbling around on a field - overacting like there’s no tomorrow. There’s absolutely nothing realistic with this stuff, nothing at all. It’s SCREAMS hoax all over! I’m sure he just put the camera in his wife’s hands and went out there in his suit and did what he had to do himself. Next time we see the creature it looks better, and Marx is wise enough to hide it a bit more, behind bushes and in the shadows.

One odd sequence up in the north sees him filming some weird lights (almost like a BIG black head with two glowing eyes) far far away in the bushes up on a mountain. Maybe I fell asleep there, but I don’t remember a logical explanation of it - except it looked like an optical effect created in the editing room.

I haven’t seen his two other documentaries about Bigfoot, but a collection of his Bigfoot footage is available on YouTube - and he continues to hide the creature behind bushes or in the darkness. BUT IS IT ENTERTAINING? I’m writing that with capital letters because I’m sure you’re tired of my word-pooping. My answer is yes and now. The nature footage is often very nice and the documentary moves along in a brisk pace (I’ve seen the shorter version, which might have helped the entertainment value) and it makes me wanna become a man of the wild myself, in checkered shirt and a brutal aroma of sweat and smoke. Maybe.

What makes the documentary extra hard to take serious (except that first footage of Bigfoot of course) is the very awkward and self-indulgent narration by Ivan Marx himself, which make us believe he’s some kind of superman, mega-explorer, the world’s best tracker and a macho man with his foxy wife Peggy by his wife all the time. He even shows us his house, his dogs, lots and lots of footage which just is there for him to make a joke (or probably more to pad the doc with more stuff). It was more than one instance where I thought I was listening to Adam West doing one of his absurd monologues in Family Guy!

After watching The Legend of Bigfoot my man, G, asked me if I believed in Bigfoot. I know he does. I still feel it’s a bit too extreme that no one have found one single proof that this animal exists during all these years, considering every citizens of the United States have seen it - or at least his or her friend’s friend, or grandma or whatever. Yeah, there’s a lot of wilderness, but in this day and age, with the technology….nothing at all. Except hoaxers who desperately trying to sell their story to everyone and their mother. In all honesty, I believe more in the Yeti! At least it’s said to live in a place which is very hard to explore...

(you can read an interesting article about the original footage here, not to Ivan Marx favor I can say)

Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (Ed Ragozzino, 1977)

I’m not entirely sure what genre Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot is, but I guess the original concept of “docudrama” could fit quite good. But still… it’s more a mix of a mockumentary and reconstructions of stuff the filmmakers actually claims happens for real. That’s a true mindfuck: faked reconstructions! Anyway, the reason why I watched this is Exists, the latest Bigfoot-film from the genius (yes) Eduardo Sánchez, and that made me go through my huge collections of movies to find all Bigfoot films I could find. Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, I will call it Sasquatch from now on, is very much a child of its time. Imagine something similar to In Search Of… or any other of those cinema-released docs (like the awesome Mysterious Monsters) with famous voice overs trying to convince us UFOs, ancients astronauts and all the other cool things out there is true.

Sasquatch begins with a serious voice (someone wrote it’s Robert W. Morgan, the director of Blood Stalkers, but I might have confused that statement with some other docudrama) explaining the legend of Bigfoot and the expeditions planned by the film’s main characters. What follows is basically a nature film with a few encounters with wild animals like mountain lion or bear, lots and lots of padding, more pointless words from our narrator and in the end, fucking finally, a the encounter we’ve been waiting for - you know which one. This is of course, as stated above, a reconstruction, but satisfyingly entertaining.

I see. You good folks out there think I hate this film? I don’t. It was actually quite cozy to watch a Sunday morning, even if it more or less completely lacks tension and entertainment - except that finale. Instead I’m kinda pissed off they shoot and kill an escaping mountain lion and somehow think this is a brave thing to do! Except that there’s a lot and lot and lot of footage of the fantastic wilderness around them, which actually is something I like and I can watch movies only because of this.

But it’s just a damn pity they couldn’t take the Bigfoot-concept a bit further, make it more spectacular - instead of filling it with some really boring slapstick, a few bad flashbacks to other Bigfoot encounters and the always boring macho-bullshit how it’s cool to freeze, starve and be in the forest for months and months. It’s not fun. No one thinks so, except those who wants to feel a little bit better than everyone else. The acting - I’m not sure I can call it acting, more like “acting” - is also so crappy it turns unbelievable. Especially the dude playing the comic relief chef, who looks like he comes right from a really shitty circus.

But hey, I’m not the one to complain (well, actually…), Sasquatch is still a fine addition to your collection of Bigfoot entertainment. It’s what we call in Sweden “mystråkig”, and that’s not bad for a generic fake Bigfoot docudrama!

Exists (Eduardo Sánchez, 2014)

I’ve always admired the guys behind The Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, probably the two most creative and interesting independent-filmmakers even after their one huge hit. Together they own Haxan Films but they don’t direct together anymore, focusing on their own projects within the company. Eduardo Sánchez is back in the found footage genre with something not-so-new, not after all these years, but manages to make it a lot more exciting and fun than most similar found footage films connected to Bigfoot/Sasquatch/random hairy dude in the forest. The movie is of course the eagerly awaited Exists!

Every regional filmmaker have churned out Bigfoot-movies since the 70’s, so the genre is hardly new - even in combination with found footage. The latest examples in this very specific genre is Willow Creek and Lost Coast Tapes, even if they have a twist on the whole Bigfoot-mythos. Exists is more or less the opposite to Willow Creek, a movie who is the Persona of Bigfoot-movies in comparison. Exists takes the other route, crafting a big, bold, silly, spectacular and violent horror story about a bunch of young people going to one of their uncles cabins, which he have forbidden anyone to go since many years back. One of them have a plan, he want to capture the Sasquatch on video - for real, not any blurry, fake-looking video. He wants to deliver the ultimate proof it exists. The others are just there to fuck, drink and be annoying. On their way there they hit something on the road, but it escapes… and soon that thing, or something else, is on the hunt for them!

The set-ups is quite standard, but like most of the stuff Haxan Films have produced the quality is one step above all the time, focusing on great characters and some truly awesome ideas. Exists might not be the THE scariest film of all time (Blair Witch is still the scariest movie they’ve done!), but it delivers a lot of really cool and intense horror sequences. Much of the movie feels like Night of the Living Dead, with the gang barricading themselves in the cabin, but when the creature finally attacks its with no fucking mercy. Sánchez takes the story outside several times and never have a big open forest seemed so claustrophobic, so unsafe! Sánchez is also behind the worst part of V/H/S/2, the A Ride in the Park segment, a great idea used in a mediocre way. Here he uses the same concept, GoPro’s on a camera, and makes it work perfectly - and it turns out to be my favorite sequence in the whole movie, one of those scenes which seriously stressed me up while watching it. Bravo.

Another cool thing with Exists is how the filmmakers slowly reveals the threat. From the beginning its like every other blurry video on YouTube claiming to be our friend Bigfoot, but slowly, scene by scene, it’s more and more clear - from every angles - sometimes damn scary also, when we just see a dark something slowly walking towards characters (it’s like ghost film, very effectively shot) and in the end we see it, full frontal, full close-up, in crisp HD...and yeah, it looks very cool. It’s the money shot, the ejaculation in a porn flick - it’s the monster HD.

Some might think this takes away from the mystery, but hey...we know what’s out there and we’ve all had our share of blurry footage and ambiguous endings. Exists decides to go the opposite way and that’s very, very cool.

Okay, listen up. I think...no, I’m sure of this: Exists and Willow Creek will make the best double feature ever. They completely works together, but with very different approaches. I would suggest you’d watch Bobcat Goldthwait’s modern classic first, as a long, juicy build-up and then directly watch Eduardo Sánchez latest found footage adventure. I think they both will enhance each other, using the weaknesses of the other movie to be stronger and more powerful.

Because we all know Bigfoot will never die…at least not in front of home video cameras and night vision GoPros.