A journalism student uncovers a grisly, horrifying secret when he digs into a bloody local murder from fifteen years ago. Worst of all, the videotape footage from the first reporters on the scene seem to have taken on a life of its own.
This film starts with shaky "found footage" of the original murders, taken by the killer's
own hand. Flash forward fifteen years (although I have to say that all these high school kids seem more like twenty-somethings than fifteen year olds) to kids doing a dramatic re-enactment for a school project. While it seems like this movie would be perfect fodder for an entire film of nausea-inducing "shaky cam" footage, it's actually kept to a minimum, which I found refreshing.
There are several twists and turns in this film, and I don't want to give them away, but what I can share with you is this... Christian Slater plays a pervy local sheriff, trading in hidden camera footage of local teenage girls. Teenage kids should never be left at home alone when there's a birthday coming up, and always, always check your stuffed animals and other gifts for hidden cameras. Seriously.
While this wasn't a terrible movie, and it only earned its R rating by the merest flash of boobs (that you could barely tell were there) and gore (which I will admit was pretty extreme), I find it hard to recommend. As knitting fodder, it was perfect... a lot of slinking through darkened buildings where nothing really happens except building tension. Then a bunch of dialogue. Then more slinking.
I was a little disappointed at the fact that we didn't really get to the meat of the supernatural cause of the whole thing until two-thirds of the way into the movie. We kind of see it in the first part, but a lot of it is left open to interpretation, and really you want to know the rules fairly early so you can tell people on the screen not to be stupid. Then again, nobody really made those kinds of mistakes. On one hand, this was actually an original horror movie in that it didn't follow a lot of those tropes... the girl who trips as she runs away, the kids who get murdered right after having sex, etc... and yet it felt like a typical schlocky horror film.
Anyway, as for my usual counts I had one holy crap moment with an extremely grisly death, and one eye-roll during the showdown scene at the end where the Lieutenant was channeling Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. It wasn't the line, it was the delivery.
I gave this a three out of five stars. While I appreciated its originality and ingenuity with tired, old material, it was slow in parts and the mythological rules were confusing or muddled... especially when you consider the killer and the fact that it was supposed to follow bloodlines. Great for streaming, but unless you want to own everything Christian Slater is in (and I know quite a few women of my generation who do) including minor roles like this one, I wouldn't buy it even at the five dollar DVD price point.
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