I feel the need to sigh before saying the word found footage movie and there is a reason for this as its been done and copied and copied and copied again and when Hollywood sees movies making huge amounts of money on production costs of next to nothing they want to cash in and many TOO MANY found footage movie were born including my loved Halloween decided to chip in with their own turd of a movie. This on the other hand hits the nail on the head and actually makes a genuinely spooky movie. I will get the usual’s over and done with, first shall I? The first movie was released in 2007 and was made on a budget of $230k (yes K!) and went on to make $193.4m at the box office which is in Blair Witch territory. This movie was met with different critic scores with mine in the middle of the usual three as IMDb gave it a 6.3/10 and Rotten Tomatoes gave it a creditable 83%. It stars Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat and that is about it with a couple of other people in there as well. Shall I move onto the story.
This is a home recording movie and basically sees a couple visiting a psychic who agrees that the girl is being possessed and haunted by a demon. The man Micah decides to try and test the theory by putting up camera’s around the house including in their bedroom to track any activity not caught when they are awake. The activity begins slowly with strange noises and doors moving on their own and there are plenty of opportunity to point the camera into dark corners of the house when searching for some unknown entity. The demon starts to get upset as the couple tries various things to rid themselves of this presence. He gets a Ouija board and she contacts the psychic again who recommends calling in a demonologist. The entity gets more aggressive as they get more involved in trying to rid the house of the unseen beast.
That’s enough of the plot as there are plenty of spooky shots of black screen when they are pointing the camera into corners of the house. A house where we are all live and all houses have dark corners in the middle of the night and this is designed to spook you and this movie definitely does that. I dare you to watch these movies when you are sat at home alone of an evening with the wind blowing and the rain pelting the windows and not get spooked, I dare you. This movie plays on the confusion of hearing random noises in the house and it expands them and the end is a bit erm not sure I will finish that sentence but the end is there as it had to be I guess but I found the build-up and the suspense better than the conclusion. This is a spooky movie and will leave a chill down your spine despite the found footage tag, what you could argue is that all of the following movies and shows may undermine the success the original and may dilute the quality of the movies but there we go. I could add that this will be the only paranormal activity movie in my list as I don’t have any of the others but this one will be worth a watch if you haven’t yet.
Comments