What makes it different from others?

hyped garbage

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

"Karma's a bitch," says Devon Sawa's Bill to James, the protagonist of 388 Arletta Avenue.James (played with a nicely dead-on everyman vacancy by Nick Stahl) has just confronted Bill with several disturbing facts: his home has been repeatedly broken into, his computer tampered with, his cat has been "replaced," and now his wife is missing. And that's just the beginning.Turns out James and his friends tormented Bill relentlessly during grade school and James, in his desperation, believes Sawa's character is behind it.Though that's far from the central thesis of Randall Cole's latest feature, it's a very engaging sidebar and probably the most alluring plot point in what seems at first to be a pretty standard found-footage psycho-stalker creeper.Except that 388 is actually a very intelligently-crafted film with an almost diabolically clever script. Stahl is tormented by everything from phantom mix CDs, footage of his wife bound and gagged somewhere, and ultimately set-up for her impending murder (after he actually DOES kill someone). While I was never bored by this film, I does suffer from a low-energy level at times. Stahl is left, quite unfortunately, to carry the film as Kirshner, an enjoyable and underused actress, is MIA (no pun intended) for most of the film. He does a commendable job, playing his ordinariness with an unsettling true-to-life banality, and he's never very likable... which is a very hard thing to achieve and still keep an audience's focus. It also probably contains one of the most creepy, amoral villains you'll encounter on film.Don't expect a traditional thriller, and certainly not something that will make you feel warm and cozy. It's one man's descent into hell for absolutely no reason other than someone's sadistic kicks.

The idea/concept behind this movie is a really good one. The way it is shot though, may appall a lot of people from the get go. Having the "shaky cam" and fuzzy cameras including sound variation is actually pretty annoying (although you do wonder where some film material is coming from, but that's another story).Nick Stahl plays the lead role and he has a lot to carry. Too much for him in my view. He can't pull off that transformation the character is going through. His outbursts are actually silly and look more like he's crazy than an actual human being. But for this movie to work, it has to be believable. And it just isn't. If you can't overlook the many flaws this movie has (like me), you won't really like this either. Acting wise it's unfortunately not up to the task (though the story/character changes do not help at times either).

This film is shot from the perspective of a stalker who torments and manipulates a young couple. He installs some sort of monitoring devices in their home, and much of the action is seen from the perspective of these hidden cameras that follow the couple around the house. Thus, the film has the feel of the Paranormal Activity films, despite the different subject matter.The villain breaks in on multiple occasions to set up traps to toy with the couple. Fairly early in the film, the wife (Mia Kirshner) leaves following a heated argument that ensued as a result of one of these traps set by the stalker. The vast majority of the film, then, involves the husband (Nick Stahl) trying to figure out where she went and who the person is who has been messing with him. The sense of danger escalates as the film progresses.The one major complaint is that the film requires some pretty major suspension of disbelief regarding the capabilities of the villain stalker. Specifically, he is almost like an omniscient puppet-master who is able to manipulate Stahl's character to do exactly as he wants. There were numerous times when Stahl could and SHOULD have reacted to some provocation by the villain in a completely different way, but instead reacted exactly as the stalker wanted, thus propelling the plot to its desired end. Stahl's troubles are compounded by some stereotypical inept, unsympathetic police and pesky in-laws who are suspicious of his story.Overall, it's a decent little film, in my estimation certainly better than the low rating here. Just go with the flow and the film will give you some genuine chills.

Just when you thought the first person perspective, found/edited footage films can no longer reinvent itself, having possibly adapted itself to all kinds of film genres suitable for the medium, writer-director Randall Cole throws in one more into the hat, and quite brilliantly it's got to do with home invasion, being acutely that of privacy, which will irk even the most liberal amongst us, feeling icky that someone else has total coverage over everything about our lives, obviously without authorization. But its smartness stretched out its luck a little too far, and what began as an interesting premise soon gave way to implausibilities that tanked the entire story.The cast list is pretty impressive though, centering around the couple James and Amy, played by Nick Stahl and Mia Kirshner respectively. But what we learn of their lives come courtesy of a stalker who voyeurs into their titular house, from a car inconspicuously parked on an opposite road. Armed with a recorder equipped with zoom lens and a directional microphone, we get to see, and hear, the couple's every move, and gain knowledge about their state of affairs and backgrounds.Yes, the filmmaker has put us into the shoes of the perpetrator, and honestly it gets quite addictive as we listen in through more cameras and more microphones, no thanks to the perp gaining entry into their home, and mounting more hidden cameras, which extended to places like their car, and office computer. That's when things got stretched a little too far, as the film started to believe in its own arrogance, that it failed to work within its own constraints set up by the premise, and had to have you accept its brand of logic, making it from a premise that's possible and real (and therefore identifiable), to film fantasy.The plot quickens after a while of static camera shifting, and this happens very frequently due to different cameras mounted at various vantage points around the house, that made the presentation one big channel surf by an attention deficit disorder sufferer. And this betrays the wafer thin plot about how Amy goes missing, and James being the wreck when he cannot locate his wife, relying on one of his suspects, Bill (Devon Sawa), to help get down to the bottom of things, and with Amy's sister Katherine (Krista Bridges) breathing down James' neck, suggesting that he has something to do with Amy's disappearance.The brilliance came only in the last ten minutes, offering a reveal that we'd already know of, and making us aware of the shoes we've been stepping into the entire time. It offers an ending that's open to more follow up films, but unless the story takes precedence, this is going to languish in gimmicky territory despite a brilliant start. It's a gem of a genre waiting to be polished further, which is a pity it wasn't done so in time for this feature film to make its necessary impact.