Don't Believe the Hype

Best movie of this year hands down!

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Over a period of 40 years young women have been found mysterious killed at 10 year intervals of the winter solstice. Raymond Banks has been convicted for the last two. A crew of four people decide to do a film on the incident on what happens to be the 10 year anniversary. They hire a professional camera man because apparently they couldn't cut off heads and jerk the camera around on their own. It was a fairly nice size camera, that I had to think, "Is someone really running holding this thing while being chased by a vampire?"The production has your typical bad found footage films plus needless build up garbage that doesn't tie into anything. Bill Oberst Jr. did a nice job of Raymond Banks for what little time he was on the screen. The rest of the cast read and screamed their formulaic lines as we await the tail end of the feature to see the creature...which to their credit wasn't the last three frames.A rental for fans of found footage. Parental Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

You can probably pass on this one if you've seen the blairwitch franchise. Basically the same movie just different creature. Young adults get lost in the woods filming a documentary, they loose their way and start to hear strange sounds at night and something starts visiting their camp. As stress builds tempers flair between the pack of adventurers. Story builds slow and the climax delivery leaves a lot to be desired, but if you like horror you'll probably watch to the end anyway just to see how much it borrowed from other films and at least you can cross it off your list and say with certainty that it's not a gem of any sort unfortunately.

The vampires look pretty decent. The premise was OK. The setting was fine. The actors were quite adequate for a found footage flick. Yet it was not a pleasurable experience.Why?The main problem with the film is that it is very unoriginal and lazy. It is a pale copy of Blair Witch Project with vampires instead of the witch.Also, the film wastes time on characters that are totally unimportant. The part of the film where they get seriously involved with the vampires comes after a totally unnecessary and dull exposition. One gets the impression of being cheated. You have people in the middle of the woods being stalked by winged vampires that hang from trees and look pretty menacing, yet you only get to see them doing things at the very end, while the build-up to it is poorly done, unlike the build-up in Blair Witch Project, which was very effective and nerve-wrecking. The final proof of the erratic and confused approach to this film by the filmmakers comes in the final scene, where the film gets into Rosemary's Baby territory. Like so many bad found footage films, this film is lazy and throws in whatever cliché it can think of, while the end result is a film that has no consistency or sense of knowing what it is and what the story is about.A wasted opportunity.

In the town of Black Water, WA, four women have been killed in the woods within the last forty years. Documentarian Danielle decides to make of movie about the events and brings a production crew of three to the town to investigate.The women had been found mutilated and with bite marks. No blood was found at the crime scenes. A man is on death row for the murders and Danielle doesn't believe he is guilty.They interview the convicted man, who seems crazy, and writes a symbol on the partition glass in blood, but doesn't give them much by the way of answers.Next they go on a hike in the snowy woods to visit the crime scenes and gather what information they can. This is where the real action starts. The movie gets pretty interesting here as they are stalked in the woods. People will draw comparisons to The Blair Witch Project here, fairly, since it does follow the same formula. The one review I skimmed said that it was wrong to show the creature, that what you don't see is scarier, a la Blair Witch. This is not true of course. Depending on what movie you are making and what you intend for the audience, both ways can be very effective, and it works here.I had a lot of fun with this movie, especially the last two scenes, which pay homage to two very popular horror movies. 7/10.