7/19/14 (Part Two): Sucker’s Bet

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13 Sins, bad cops, bad decisions, brothers, cinema, conspiracy theories, corrupt law enforcement, Daniel Stamm, deadly games, desperate times, Devon Graye, dysfunctional family, Elliot Brindle, film reviews, films, horror films, Mark Webber, Movies, Pruitt Taylor Vance, remakes, Ron Perlman, Rutina Wesley, The Game, The Last Exorcism, Tom Bower, writer-director

Just what, exactly, would you be willing to do for complete financial freedom? It’s an interesting question, especially in this day and age where any and everyone seem desperate to secure their “15 minutes of fame” by any means necessary. The formerly notorious but now (presumably) passe game show, Fear Factor, sought to answer this question with a variety of stunts and “dares,” although the rewards usually fell far short of the aforementioned “complete financial freedom” angle. In this case, contestants would eat reindeer testicles, sit in glass boxes filled with tarantulas and perform “hazardous” stunts (hazardous, of course, being a relative term when network television takes as many precautions as humanly possible to avoid on-air death), all for a cash prize that, if memory serves correctly, was nowhere near the amount required to make someone financially independent.

In the case of Fear Factor, people were willing to do some pretty icky things (eating balut, as far as I’m concerned, will always be a deal-breaker) but everything was undertaken with the assurance (again, born of network television, the “safe word” of the entertainment industry) that no harm could really befall the contestants or those around them: the very worst that could happen would be someone puking, which falls pretty low on the “soul-shattering” scale. What if the safety nets of polite society were removed, however? What if the stakes were raised and someone were actually offered complete financial security in exchange for completing a series of ever more heinous tasks? Where would we end up drawing the line? Would we draw a line? These are the questions that writer/director Daniel Stamm asks in 13 Sins (2014), a remake of the earlier Thai film 13: Game of Death (2006). When basic morality stands in the way of a truly life-changing amount of money, is the world really as black and white as we wish it were? Or are the obvious shades of gray that fill the margins more terrifying than any potential monster under the bed?

After a truly dynamic, disturbing opening that introduces us to the closing moves of a previous “game,” 13 Sins begins proper by introducing us to our hero, the put-upon sad-sack known as Elliot Brindle (Mark Webber). As far as problems go, Elliot has a fairly full plate: he’s just about to get married to his pregnant fiancée, Shelby (Rutina Wesley), while also taking care of his mentally disabled brother, Michael (Devon Graye) and his bitter, racist, hateful father (Tom Bower). To make everything better, Elliot has just been fired from his job as an insurance salesman (he isn’t able to “do what it takes,” which is about as obvious as the foreshadowing really gets), his brother is getting kicked out of his care facility and his father is getting kicked out of his retirement home. Holy insurmountable problems, Batman! To whit: Elliot now has no income, an expensive wedding to take care of and needs to move his vile father (Shelby happens to be black, which makes her a constant target for the father’s virulent racism) and loving but “challenging” brother into his small home. For most people, these might be the kind of issues that would completely crush and destroy someone’s spirit. Turns out, Elliot may just be one of those kind of folks, after all.

Our hero’s luck changes, however, when he gets a mysterious phone call while stopped at a deserted intersection in the middle of the night. The unknown, excessively jovial person on the other end of the line tells Elliot that he has the opportunity to be on a game show: when Elliot, rightfully, expresses his disbelief, the caller proceeds to reveal several aspects about Elliot’s personal life that no one should really know. He then tells Elliot to swat the pesky fly that’s currently bopping around his car: if he does, he’ll automatically earn $1000. After swatting the fly, Elliot receives a text message that alerts him to the successful completion of Task 1. A follow-up calls gives Elliot his next task: eat the dead fly and receive $3622, the exact amount that Shelby owes on her credit card. This would make an awfully nice wedding present, according to the voice, and a perfect way to begin Elliot and Shelby’s life as a married couple.

After getting home and checking his bank account, Elliot realizes that the caller isn’t joking: $1000 has recently been deposited to his account. After roughly a second of forethought, Elliot eats the fly, completing Task 2 and receiving his next payment. At this point, the mysterious caller fills him in on the rest of the details: Elliot must complete a total of thirteen excessively more difficult tasks, each task worth an increasingly large sum of money, all the way up to the 13th task, which will reward Elliot with a “life-changing amount of money.” Failure to complete any task will result in “losing it all,” including all money won up to that point, as will trying to interfere with the game in any way. Telling anyone about the game, whether his loving fiancée or law enforcement officials, will also result in a loss: according to the voice, the game is solely Elliot’s to win (or lose). If he wins, Elliot and Shelby will begin their new life on their own terms. If he loses, well…how much worse off could he get? Elliot completes his registration process by facing the bathroom window and intoning “I will dance with the golden toad”: with that, the game is afoot…and Elliot’s fate is sealed.

The kicker, of course, is that Elliot really has no idea how bad things will get until the shit hits the proverbial fan. While the initial tasks seem harmless, if decidedly odd (killing and eating a fly may be nasty but it doesn’t exactly turn someone into Ed Gein), the follow-up tasks find Elliot going down an increasingly grim rabbit hole of public disturbance and reprehensible behavior: making a child cry, burning up a church’s nativity scene (handcrafted by blind children, naturally), getting revenge on a childhood bully. As Elliot completes the increasingly more unpleasant tasks, he must take great pains to keep Shelby, Michael and his father from figuring out what’s going on. Things become even more complicated when a gruff, no-nonsense police detective (Ron Perlman) begins investigating Elliot’s various “crimes.” As the caller continually reminds Elliot, he’s now so far into the game that winning it is the only way out: otherwise, he’ll end up serving some pretty decent jail time for his various “crimes against humanity.”

Elliot is fundamentally a good guy, however, and really just wants to provide for his family under some pretty difficult circumstances. As a nice guy, he begins to balk at some of the tasks but an odd thing begins to happen: as Elliot completes more and more tasks, he begins to get a bit…well, acclimated, to the whole thing. He begins to swagger around and get back some of his old self-confidence. While Elliot may not be doing particularly nice things, he is, at the very least, taking direct steps to dig his way out of the financial hole he’s buried in. He’s doing what all of us would like to do: pulling himself up by his own bootstraps and initiative. Once the tasks take a horrifying turn, however, Elliot is left with a very basic but all-important question: what does it benefit a man to gain it all if he loses his very humanity, in the process? As his life spirals completely out of control and Elliot comes ever closer to that feared 13th Task, he will quickly learn that there are more than one way to play any game. And, sometimes, winning can be worse than losing.

While watching 13 Sins, I was constantly reminded of an old saying: “If this is the kind of thing you like, then you’re gonna love this.” In some ways, Stamm’s film is the very epitome of this ideal: certain people (myself included) will eat up the film’s concentrated nastiness with a spoon, whereas others will find the whole thing to be such a despicable little bit of coal-black misanthropy that they probably won’t make it past the first 10 minutes. To be fair, both viewpoints are completely valid: 13 Sins is absolutely not for everyone and anyone with a decidedly “sensitive” palette should approach this with extreme caution. While the film does go to some pretty intense places, gore-wise, it goes to some even more intense places, concept-wise, which will probably be the dividing line for most folks.

In many ways, the film acts as a sort of moral barometer, asking the audience just how far “too far” really is. I can think of very few people who would have significant moral quandaries over eating, much less killing, a fly. I even know plenty of people who might not balk at making an anonymous child cry (if you know who you are, for gods’ sake, keep your damn hand down!). Suffice to say, however, that I’m eternally grateful for not knowing anyone who could surf through all 13 tasks without feeling at least some sort of pang to the conscience area, especially once we get to the dreaded 13th task. This, then, is the film’s greatest coup and its biggest virtue: it sets up a slippery-slope of dubious actions that traps the viewer half-way down, like a Venus Fly Trap. As we find more and more ways to justify what goes on (I could do that, if I really tried…I could do that if I didn’t think about it…I could do that if I really had to…I could do that if I had absolutely no other choice), it becomes painfully clear that morality and the notion of “good vs evil” are much less concretely defined than many of us might have previously hoped. Even when one adds in the supposed assurances of organized religion, there’s still the unspoken notion that we would violate any and every taboo if only to safeguard our loved ones: hard-and-fast rules are all well and good until it’s your husband/wife/baby/parents/siblings/best friends on the chopping block. At that point, many of us might find ourselves rethinking long-held notions of right and wrong, arriving at a definition that’s a bit more conditional and less rigidly enforced.

But this is all, of course, almost completely academic: a film can worry us with moral quandaries until the cows come home (Are the cows properly treated? Have they been fed growth hormones and kept in tiny pens? Are we raising them simply to be slaughtered or do realize that all living creatures have inherent value as individuals? What if the cows can’t find their way home?) but still have as much impact as one of those old videos from high school health classes. How does 13 Sins hold up as an actual film? Does it work as both a thriller/chiller and a thought-provoking dissertation on our modern malaise? For the most part, despite a few rather sizable plot holes, the answer is a resounding “absolutely.”

While I’ve never seen Stamm’s previous films (I’ve never cared enough for demonic possession films to have really paid The Last Exorcism (2010) much attention and his debut, A Necessary Death (2008) sounds intriguing but was, likewise, off my radar), 13 Sins is a thoroughly well-made, effective little film. Mark Webber channels the working-class relateability of someone like Sam Rockwell in his portrayal of Elliot, which makes it much easier to empathize with his character’s oftentimes terrible decision-making. Devon Graye is excellent as the developmentally-disabled Michael, managing to make the character seem less stereotypical than might previously be possible for a character of this type in a genre film. Perlman, of course, is spectacular but when is the guy ever bad? Even if he were phoning in the performance (which he doesn’t), Perlman would be an utterly magnetic, charismatic presence: there’s one throwaway bit where he sticks his tongue out at a little girl that manages to be hit so many character “buttons” at one time that it’s kind of ridiculous…in a completely badass way, of course. My big complaint with Perlman’s performance in 13 Sins is the same from any film that he doesn’t star in: there’s way too little of him here, although what’s here is suitably excellent. The rest of the cast, from Tom Bower’s obnoxious father to Rutina Wesley’s eternally faithful, if utterly confused, Shelby provide great support for Webber but, ultimately, this is his film and his journey to make.

From a production standpoint, 13 Sins is top-notch: while the film often has a glossy, heavily produced look, the subject matter is pure exploitation, taking a certain perverse glee in presenting a raft of unpleasant situations in as visually appealing a way as possible. When they saw an arm off in the film, it looks great, even if the scene is so protracted as to practically demand nausea: it’s the film’s great blessing (curse?) that everything is delivered in as hyper-realistic a way as possible, even as the scenarios become increasingly fanciful and “unrealistic.”

Since 13 Sins is, technically, a mystery (at least in the same vein as Fincher’s The Game (1997)), the script becomes all-important and Stamm (working with co-writer David Birke) has crafted a particularly smart, strong foundation. While I found the ultimate resolution to be a little problematic (without going into much detail, it bothered me that Elliot didn’t think through the ultimate ramifications of his final bit of revenge: could he have really been that short-sighted?), the plot is exceedingly tight. The tendency to group certain tasks together felt a little arbitrary and more than a little lazy, on occasion (Wait…we really have to think up 13 different tasks? What if we just came up with…I dunno…11 or so and just fudged the rest?) and there were a few elements that seemed unnecessarily vague (I still have no idea what the 5th Task entailed, although I’m pretty sure the filmmakers didn’t, either) but these are, ultimately, pretty small quibbles. When 13 Sins works, it works amazingly well, provided the same sort of gut-punch, visceral reaction that I had to the first Saw (2004). When it doesn’t work, it’s a quick-paced, highly entertaining and suitably sleazy thriller: in my book, that’s kind of a win-win situation.

Ultimately, 13 Sins, like American Mary (2012), is one of those films that is easy for me to like but difficult for me to recommend. While the subject matter is certainly less immediately reprehensible than the body modification/torture scenarios of American Mary, I can’t help but feel that many viewers will feel completely shut out of the pitch-black heart that beats at the center of 13 Sins. In many ways, Stamm’s film is holding a cracked fun house mirror up to society and asking us if we like what we see: in a day and age where, literally, “anything goes,” Stamm asks us to reconsider that notion just a little further. After all, you might be willing to do just about anything to provide yourself with a viable future but how far are you actually willing to go to test that hypothesis? Killing that fly is a small step, sure, but it’s still the first step: at this point, what step are we all on and how far will we go before we say “enough is enough?”

7/8/14: Buffalo Bill vs the Aliens

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aliens, Anne Roland, Banshee Chapter, Blair Erickson, Buffalo Bill, cinema, conspiracy theories, Fallen, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, flashbacks, found-footage, government secrets, Katia WInter, Michael McMillian, missing friend, MK-Ultra, Movies, mysterious broadcasts, radio broadcast, radio stations, sci-fi-horror, secret labs, Silence of the Lambs, Ted Levine, Thomas Blackburn, writer-director

After a distressingly rough opening, writer/director Blair Erickson’s modest sci-fi chiller, Banshee Chapter (2013) ends up settling into a pretty comfortable groove, thanks in no small part to an enjoyably over-the-top performance by none other than The Silence of the Lamb’s (1991) own Buffalo Bill, Ted Levine. Levine is pretty gonzo (pun intended) as a free-spirited writer who looks and acts a whole lot like Hunter S. Thompson and he, along with some pretty creepy ideas and visuals, manage to do a lot of the heavy lifting. There ends up being quite a lot of slack to take up here, though, thanks to a rather confusing script, some perspective issues regarding the found-footage aspect and an overly trite resolution. The film’s never dull, however, and even manages flashes of brilliance, from time to time, usually whenever Levine is snarfing up scenery.

Journalist Anne Roland (Katia Winter) is on the hunt for her old college friend, James (Michael McMillian), who’s gone missing after consuming some sort of experimental chemical known as MK-Ultra. We’ve already seen James get snatched by “something,” thanks to the rather stereotypical found-footage opening, so we’re one step ahead of poor Anne: things are strange and only going to get stranger.

After going to see a short-wave radio enthusiast, in order to identify the radio broadcast that can be heard during James’ recorded final minutes, Anne is introduced to the notion of “numbers stations”: short-wave radio stations that broadcast odd transmissions consisting of robotic voices (male, female and children, various languages) reading strings of numbers. In this case, Anne’s contact tells her that the best way to catch that particular station is to listen from the far side of the Black Rock Desert, sometime between 3-5 in the morning. She does and ends up hearing the broadcast for herself, along with catching a glimpse of “something” out in the darkness.

Properly spooked, Anne tracks down the person that she believes sent James the chemical, the aforementioned Thomas Blackburn (Ted Levine). Once she meets Blackburn, Anne really goes down the rabbit-hole, getting introduced to a new world of government conspiracies, secret tests and alternate dimensions. As Anne and Blackburn move from one clue to the next, they get closer to the original source of the MK-Ultra, the mysterious Dr. Kessel (Chad Brummett). The answers to all of Anne’s questions may be found within the abandoned walls of Kessel’s desert bunker…along with the keys to the destruction of mankind.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: there’s a lot to like in Banshee Chapter but you have to be willing to wade through a bit of refuse to get there. For one thing, the film never really finds its footing as a found-footage film: too often, there are disingenuous moments, like non-digetic sound or subjective camera angles, that tend to throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery. The film is also terribly fond of loud musical stingers for jump scares and the ending, which manages to reference Fallen (1998), is kind of a mess.

Despite lots of issues, however, there are plenty of genuinely creepy moments in the film, not least of which is the moment where Anne goes to listen to the radio broadcast in the middle of desert. With her face lit only by the green dashboard light, the scene is a masterpiece of economy and subtly, wringing every last drop of tension possible out of the scenario. The desert bunker is also a pretty incredible location and is well-used in the film: good locations go along way toward making a horror film and Banshee Chapter has a few memorable ones. The overall idea is also pretty damn creepy: I’ve always been fascinated by numbers stations and the film weaves their mythology into the storyline in some pretty smart ways, arriving at a final reveal that I really wish hadn’t been let down by the pedestrian finale.

More than anything, however, Ted Levine’s performance as Blackburn is a huge check mark in the “asset” column for the film. I’m hard-pressed to remember anything that Levine has been in, aside from Silence of the Lambs, but he’s absolutely fantastic in Banshee Chapter, even if he’s basically playing his own version of Johnny Depp’s version of Hunter S. He’s quick-witted, genuinely funny, just outrageous enough to be believable and never less than completely committed to the role. If anything, I wish that there had been more Blackburn in the film: making him the protagonist may have given the film the extra edge it needed to truly excel. As it is, however, Levine is one very big reason to give the film a shot.

First-time writer/director Erickson does quite a bit right on his debut feature, even if he also manages to trip more than a time or two. More than anything, his script shows a willingness to take some pretty familiar concepts (found-footage, government conspiracies, secret medical facilities) and take them into some fairly original new places. If he’s less successful than he could be, this (hopefully) hints at lots of room to grow and improve in the future. While Banshee Chapter is no hidden masterpiece, it’s a consistently watchable, often unnerving chiller that features a handful of truly interesting ideas, a great performance by Levine and some really creepy locations. It also might make you think twice about those strange, fuzzed-out stations that you can sometimes almost hear, wafting through the universe on a warm, summer night.

 

7/1/14: That New World Odor

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Aaron Poole, Alan C. Peterson, Bruce Clayton, Christopher MacBride, cinema, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists, cults, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, found-footage, James Gilbert, Lina Roessler, Mithras, Movies, New World Order, paranoia, secret societies, Tarsus Club, the Bilderberg Group, The Conspiracy, thrillers, writer-director

If you think about it, it’s really not so difficult to imagine that some sort of world-wide conspiracy is responsible for the current state of the world. After all, in a time when the rich and multi-national corporations have their hand in everything from food safety to the justice system to scientific research, it’s not a stretch to assume that they don’t really have the best interests of “the rest of us” in mind. After all, the robber barons may have built America but they didn’t build it for the railroad workers, the slaves and the “poor, huddled masses”: they built it for themselves and were “nice” enough to allow everybody else to live there…for a price, of course. Just because the notion of a secret, all-powerful group who runs the world from behind the scenes is plausible, however, certainly doesn’t make it fact. As with many things, the belief in large-scale conspiracies requires no small amount of faith on the part of the believer: after all, you can find a pattern in almost anything, if you look hard enough. On the other hand, however…is it really paranoia if someone is actually out to get you?

Writer-director Christopher MacBride tackles this idea of global, secretive society head-on in his recent found-footage thriller, The Conspiracy (2012) and the results are certainly fascinating, if less than eye-opening. While much of the film revolves around some pretty basic, “Conspiracy 101” ideas (chem-trails, the Illuminati, secret societies, the NSA, New World Order, et al), The Conspiracy manages to be more than just a soapbox: there’s plenty of genuine tension and a cracking good ending that manages to reference both The Wicker Man (1973) and Kill List (2011) while still managing to maintain its own sense of self. While The Conspiracy might not have the capacity to change the world, it certainly offers a nice respite from the usual “haunted house/lost in the woods/exploring the asylum”-type of found footage films and should certainly hold some appeal for fans of more thoughtful horror offerings.

Beginning with a quote from Benjamin Disraeli about how the world is governed by very different forces than we imagine, we’re introduced to our protagonists, Aaron (Aaron Poole) and Jim (James Gilbert), a pair of filmmakers making a documentary about conspiracy theorists. Jim is the more settled of the two, thanks to his loving wife, Tracy (Lina Roessler) and infant son, while Aaron is the wilder and woollier of the pair (at times, Poole reminds of Aaron Paul). We’re told that the dynamic duo began working with uber-conspiracy theorist Terrance G (Alan C. Peterson) in 2011, after coming across YouTube clips of Terrance practicing his particular brand of street-corner conspiracy evangelism. His goal, as he tells the fellows, is to let “them” know that he knows about them: watching the watchers, as it were.

After a July 11th interview, however, Aaron and Jim lose contact with Terrance for four weeks. Going to his formerly cluttered apartment, they find the whole place cleaned-out, save for heaps of the newspaper clippings that Terrance kept tagged to every available surface in his place. Taking the assorted clippings with them, the pair is, at first, extremely flippant about Terrance’s disappearance (“Maybe the mother-ship came and picked him up”) but are still curious about his “research.” As Aaron becomes more and more invested in the clippings, however, he begins to adopt some of Terrance’s rather nutso tendencies, such as filling every available surface in his home with clippings, scraps of paper and pictures while also noticing a distressing amount of mysterious folks hanging around everywhere. Jim is naturally skeptical of the whole thing (“Every conspiracy theory is up there: if you stare at it long enough, of course it will make sense,” Jim tells Aaron in exasperation) but begins to come around when Aaron makes a breakthrough. According to Terrance’s research, Aaron is able to trace the source of many of these conspiracies back to a single group: the Tarsus Club (standing in for the real-life Bilderberg Group).

According to Aaron (and Terrance), the Tarsus Club (whose symbol is a red bull’s head) has been pulling the strings on every major political, socio-economic and cultural issue for generations: their meetings always seem to occur right before big, world-changing events (such as wars) and the group seems unnecessarily secretive: their website describes Tarsus as “a membership-only club for leaders” and a call to their listed phone number only results in an automated female voice repeating Aaron’s phone back, over and over. Clearly, something is going on here and the guys do what any self-respecting researchers would do: they flood the internet with requests for any and all information about the Tarsus Club and their activities. Soon, they’re sent an invitation to meet in one of the online conspiracy virtual chat-rooms that Terrance frequented: once there, they’re introduced to Mark Tucker (Bruce Clayton), the supposed author of a Time Magazine article about the Tarsus Club. Mark agrees to meet with them, in person, and give them the low-down on Tarsus, provided they stop with all the internet stuff: according to him, it’s just pricking the bull (so to speak) and will only result in them getting unceremoniously squashed.

Mark proves to be a rather strange, enigmatic figure, whose obviously broken and reset hand speaks to some pretty dire stuff in his background. He fills them in on the Tarsus Club, telling them that the club actually dates back to a pre-Christian cult that worshipped the god Mithras. Mithras was always depicted killing a bull, hence the bull-head symbol, and Tarsus Club meeting always include the ritual killing of a bull. When asked what the point of all this is, Mark readily points to the New World Order: the desire to put more power in the hands of fewer people has resulted in the entire world being split up between a few factions, all of which are connected to Tarsus.

As time passes, Aaron becomes more and more paranoid: he sees strangers stalking him at all times and ends up moving in with Jim and Tracy after his apartment is ransacked. When a mysterious, black SUV shows up at Jim’s house late one night, he begins to get the notion that this whole enterprise might be a wee bit hazardous for him and his family but Aaron refuses to back down. When Mark tells them that he can actually sneak them into the next Tarsus Club meeting, so that they can see what goes on firsthand, Aaron jumps at the chance, dragging a much more hesitant Jim along for the ride. The pair will soon learn, however, to be careful what they wish for, as they get to witness, firsthand, just how the Tarsus Club conducts business.

As a unique spin on found-footage films, The Conspiracy really stands out, with one rather odd caveat: most of the cinematography is way too good to ever be passed off as found-footage. In fact, up until the two infiltrate the meeting, there’s not much of the film that couldn’t pass for a more “traditional” paranoid thriller. While I expected this to bother me, I actually got used to it pretty quick: in many ways, The Conspiracy is more of a faux-documentary than a found-footage film (at least until the final 15 minutes or so). The cinematography, by veteran camera operator Ian Anderson (who also makes an appearance in the film), is quite good throughout and goes a long way towards establishing the film’s chilly, sinister atmosphere.

I was also quite fond of many of MacBride’s filmmaking tricks, such as the decision to “blur out” all of the faces of the people at the Tarsus Club: this added an extra air of authenticity to the proceedings, which helped with the overall suspension of disbelief. In fact, everything about the Tarsus Club portion is spot-on and pretty great, especially from a horror standpoint. If the film has the occasional rough moment in its first two-thirds, the back-half is consistently well-done and, at times, quite frightening. While I could see the ending coming fairly early on (if you watch enough of these kinds of films, it’s pretty inevitable, regardless of the quality of said film), MacBride still managed to throw a few twists in that I didn’t see coming. The Conspiracy is MacBride’s feature debut and I’m genuinely interested to see where he goes from here: I’m not sure if the gentleman is actually interested in conspiracy theories or is merely mining fertile ground for his own uses but he’s obviously a talented filmmaker/writer, which is always a great find.

Ultimately, despite its emphasis on conspiracy theories and paranoia, The Conspiracy is not simply aimed at a core, captive audience. I’m willing to bet that anyone, regardless of political or social believes, would find something to like in the film: after all, remove the conspiracy angle stuff and you’re still left with a whip-smart thriller that features just enough horror elements to appeal to a wide swatch of potential viewers. While The Conspiracy may not revolutionize the world (or filmmaking, for that matter), it’s a more than worthy addition to the growing canon of found-footage/first-person-POV films and should appeal to anyone with an open mind and about 80 minutes to kill. Remember, though: it’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you.