Some folks complained that Imitation Girl was a knockoff of Under the Skin, but I didn't see the latter so I can't support/refute those claims - I only bring it up so that you, internet commenter, don't bother to make the same comparison. Even if it was intentional... so what? Friday the 13th was an admitted attempt to cash in on Halloween, and both of those are loved by horror fans, so I think we can accept two movies about aliens taking the form of a human woman. And from what little I know of the other film, I can tell they have different plots entirely - while that one had a rising body count and a sole performance for its lead, Imitation Girl has no violence and is more of a drama about the alien woman and the regular human whose form she clones.
Both roles are played by Lauren Ashley Carter, who was so good in Jug Face and is even more impressive here playing the two roles. As the alien one, she spends the movie adapting to a human life, seemingly not possessing any traditional movie alien traits (i.e. she doesn't want to kill everyone) and making her way around the southwestern US - Starman may come to mind, and that's probably fine with writer/director Natasha Kermani, since it's similarly about what it means to be human and also reaffirming that maybe not every alien that comes to earth wants to kill us. The other character is Julianna, an model/adult film actress whose magazine spread gives "Imitation" her inspiration for human form (the alien is seemingly made of black goo otherwise). Her life, as we quickly learn, kind of sucks - she's doing films that are bad even by porn standards, selling drugs to make ends meet, and basically having trouble making one meaningful connection with another person.
It only takes about a half hour (if that) of the film cutting back and forth between their day to day life to see where it's going - they're going to meet up and fill in the missing pieces for the other. So it's unfortunate that (SPOILER!) the movie is practically over by the time this actually happens, as I could have happily watched another movie of them palling around or doing... well, anything really. The film ends so abruptly after their first encounter that it's not even clear what either of them might have done with the other had they any time to do so. Carter's dual performances are so good that I never minded when it would cut from one to the other, as I was equally compelled by both of their single storylines, but part of it was my excitement for what would happen when they finally met, and the payoff for that wasn't as fulfilling.
Until then, good stuff. Kermani's got a great eye, and her music elevates many of these scenes to boot. There's one around the halfway point (if that) where Imitation is learning to cook and learn Farsi (an Iranian man finds her in the desert and lets her stay at the home he shares with his sister) that I found quite moving, completely forgetting that I actually started watching this thinking it was about an alien woman presumably doing movie alien things (i.e. TENTACLE MURDERS!), and by the end I actually forgot the character started off as a puddle of black goo. The filmmaker also does a fine job balancing the two narratives; the risk of tonal shifts is quite high since Imitation's scenes are generally uplifting while Julianna's life continually gets worse, but it never feels that way at all. If one character's path wasn't interesting, the movie as a whole wouldn't work - thankfully it's not an issue.
I should be clear that this isn't even remotely a horror movie - no one is trying to harm anyone, nothing is particularly scary, etc. It's a straight up character drama with an unusual premise involving an alien. But it's part of Dread Central's label, and while the movies have been hit or miss, I do like what they're doing and wanted to make sure horror fans are aware of the steadily increasing line of titles (most of which are indeed full blown horror). The discs all have extensive bonus features and there's a healthy variety of sub-genres being represented (including documentaries - they put out the one about Kane Hodder that I quite liked), plus reversible art for those who like to have options. I assume it's Carter's experience with the genre and the keyword "alien" that got it on their radar, but I'm glad they branched out of their comfort zone to present it as I might not have seen it otherwise - which is really the main draw of these specialty lines, far as I'm concerned. If this came out from IFC or A24 or whatever I probably wouldn't have seen it, but being part of a budding line that I'm naturally inclined to take an interest in meant it got to my eyeballs. And hopefully yours too, if it sounds up your "not in the mood for traditional horror" alley.
As movie concepts go, "What if Kal-El became Michael Myers instead of Clark Kent?" is kind of a great one - it allows the filmmakers to use a story everyone knows and then pivot into something different. It's basically the same as Marvel's "What If?" series (as I'm not a big DC reader, I don't know if they had something similar - forgive me if they do), where you'd get something like "What if Spider-Man saved Uncle Ben?" or "What if the Fantastic Four all got the same powers?", and get a quick glimpse of what that'd be like, per the imagination of that issue's writer anyway. It's such an interesting idea that I almost wish Brightburn had made tens of millions of dollars this past weekend, because maybe it'd launch an anthology series of films that had the same core idea, and then one creative team would do something more exciting beyond the one line concept.
Because sadly, if you've seen the trailer for the film, you've basically seen every idea it has - there's really nothing to it beyond which I've already described. It takes the core origin of Superman that you've seen in any number of movies (including/perhaps especially Man of Steel, more on that soon) and gives you a Cliff's Notes version so that they can get to the R-rated switcheroom but then never gets any more ambitious after that. For those who have somehow never seen a Superman origin story, the setup is this: the childless owners of a farm (played by Elizabeth Banks and David Denman) find a crashed spaceship in the woods behind their house one night, and it has what looks like a human baby. They raise it as their own, and as he grows up he discovers he has powers: super strength, heat vision, flight, etc., but to them he's still their son and they want to protect him. In the DC comics and movies, he of course becomes Superman/Clark Kent, a man of justice and principal who uses his powers for good.
In Brightburn, he uses his powers to melt a guy's head, or fly someone up hundreds of feet into the air only to drop them. As to WHY he does these things, the movie never bothers to explain that, but unlike Michael Myers I feel this time we kind of should know what exactly turned him into a murderer. Since the origin is so clearly taken from Superman's, it's puzzling why this film's primary character (named Brandon Breyer) turns out so different from Clark Kent. If it's a nature vs nurture thing, fine, but as we don't ever see the home planet or even learn anything about it, we have to just assume it's an... evil planet? I guess? Banks and Denman are seen to be great and loving parents, even after he starts doing terrible things, so I guess we have to just assume that it's simply in his nature to be an alien killer, and the planet is playing a long con by dropping him to Earth and waiting 12 years for him to do anything murder-y.
It's one of the many things that the film could have taken the time to explore, or even hint at. Instead it just lets Brandon discover a power, use it to kill someone, lie about his whereabouts to his only somewhat suspicious parents, and then repeat the cycle again. Worse, there's no real connective tissue from one sequence to the next, as if everyone just kind of hit a mental reset button in between scenes. At one point early on, Brandon lashes out as his father for not letting him have a birthday gift (a rifle), ruining his birthday party and rightfully pissing the man off - but in the next scene everyone's hunky dory again. And it extends to the other characters too; Brandon visits a classmate who is already afraid of him, and when she mentions her mother not wanting him anywhere near her, he says he'll take care of it and disappears. You'd think the girl would warn her mother, or at least mention it to the cops when the woman turned up missing (it's the lady in the diner you've seen in the trailer), but nope! She's barely even mentioned again.
And that is very frustrating, because each scene on its own is fine, sometimes even quite good, especially when it concerns a character whose fate WASN'T spoiled in the damn trailer. But they don't really add up to much, so as the film went on I found myself less and less interested and basically just mentally checking off when each thing from the trailer happened and in turn what would be left ("Where's that bit where Banks runs to the door to see a cop just as Brandon flies by and whooshes him off? Oh, there it is."). Even the film's closing scene was given away in the spots, so it almost felt like I was watching an extended cut of a film I already saw instead of being engaged by a new story. Such a flimsy narrative can be saved by strong/memorable characters, but that's a miss too; characterization is so thin that at an hour into the movie, Banks' character comes home with a name tag on and it was the first time I was aware she even had a job (what exactly it is is still a mystery).
Also, while the gore gags are great (there's one involving a jaw that KNB, Savini, etc. must be jealous they didn't do first), the stalking parts aren't particularly scary or suspenseful, killing much of the "It's a superhero slasher" appeal for me. If you're a fan of the later Jason movies where you rooted for him and they doubled the body counts, you might be into it, but as I prefer the older ones where the filmmakers were still trying to have some real tension in there, I found it lacking in that department. There are some nice shots here and there, like one of Brandon standing (flying?) at a window as the drapes blow him in and out of visibility, but the stalking is pretty much always the same - he is standing in a spot, then he's gone, then he's right next to the target and kills them. The gimmick gets old after two kills, and the script never bothers to introduce any real wrinkles or surprises. Banks discovers a weakness, but it's a non-starter, and there are no equally powered heroes for him to fight or anything like that - he just does his thing over and over until the movie hits a 90 minute mark, at which point it ends.
So really, the only thing that really kept me engaged was my amusement that producer James Gunn (his brother and cousin wrote the script) convinced Sony to give him a few million bucks to make fun of Zack Snyder, his "partner" from Dawn of the Dead (Gunn's script was rewritten by others once Snyder came on board; I'm not sure if the two ever actually collaborated in a traditional way). Snyder's version of Superman has been (rightfully) criticized for being kind of an asshole, without much regard for the human beings around him, so it seemed to me like Gunn and his crew had the idea of taking it to the next level and turning him into an actual serial killer. Which is very funny, yes, but probably would have worked better as a Funny or Die short film or the one-shot comic book I described. For a feature film, as good as that joke may be, it ultimately wore too thin for me. It's a fine enough one-time watch I guess, but this concept deserved a lot more meat on the bone.
I don't know what it is about Prometheus that gets people so worked up on both sides of the argument, but I hope we don't have to listen to the same online shouting matches for another five years about Alien: Covenant, because despite the title it's really just "Prometheus 2", following up that film's themes and, once he's reintroduced, main character. Additionally, it suffers from a number of the exact same problems (dumb characters! Too much ret-conning about where the aliens came from!), so it's possible some of these folks can just copy paste their old critiques into new Facebook posts. My only hope is that Ridley Scott makes the next film quicker, and then it finally connects up to the first Alien, so people can stop theorizing and go on with their damn lives. Until then, please stop arguing - both films have strong points and weak points, like most movies ever made (including Alien and Aliens, sorry to burst your bubble), and like EVERY movie ever made, there will be people who saw it differently than you, and their minds won't be changed by your tweetstorm.
As for me, if I was ranking the series, I'd put this one about in the middle, same as Prometheus, in that both are not up to the original "Ripley Trilogy" but better than Resurrection and the two AVPs, though I guess those films no longer count (if they ever did?) thanks to the reveals in this new branch of the series, which makes AVP's plot seemingly impossible. I'll let you discover the specifics yourself, but I don't think I'm spoiling too much when I say David (from Prometheus) is back and has seemingly doubled down on his "villainous by curiosity" nature, as he is once again doing things just to kind of see what happens even though he seemingly knows it will spell doom for his human colleagues. But this time there is another android, Walter (also played by Michael Fassbender, with a different accent) who is a later model than David, designed to be less human i.e. potentially evil. It's this dynamic that Scott was clearly interested in (the film opens with a lengthy conversation between David and his creator, Guy Pearce - this time without old man makeup), and thus it's no surprise that it's also where the film really shines - the two androids conversing about whether saving someone's life is programming or a "soul" is fascinating, and I could have easily watched another half hour or so of their debate.
But alas, people who bought tickets for Prometheus wanted more alien action than they got, so this time they get it, even if Scott's heart doesn't seem into it. People will argue about the gestation periods and all that because they have nothing better to do with their lives, but everyone else can enjoy the fact that we get not one but two aliens bursting out of bodies in the film's first half, along with the accompanying body count. The plot, such as it is, concerns the titular Covenant, a pioneer ship with fifteen active crew and a couple thousand frozen colonists ready to build a new world on a distant planet that was found inhabitable. But as this is an Alien film, a mysterious transmission from none other than Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace's character from Prometheus) has them detouring to another planet (no, not LV-426, but not the one from Prometheus either) and looking for the person who sent it, and that's where the trouble begins as two people get infected (with a new method - inhaling xeno-spores!) while they hunt for Shaw on this strange planet.
One interesting thing I noticed is that the movie has very few "nighttime" scenes - most of the alien action occurs outside during daytime (albeit overcast, it's not a "sunny" entry), which allows us a better look at the various creatures. The full sized ones are practical and used sparingly but well, so all of that stuff is fine - the problem is that the action/horror beats themselves are rather uninspired. Again, these people are rather dumb, or at least overly prone to panic, as one blows up themselves AND their transport by firing wildly in a room filled with gas tanks, and later one shoots his squadmate in the same circumstances. Two of them even go off for some shower sex at one point; to be fair they thought the alien was dead at that point, but were you REALLY in the mood after ten of your friends were killed? If Scott and his writers (four are credited) put as much effort into these sequences as they did the more thought-provoking, big idea ones, this could be a minor classic instead of just a pretty good entry in a very erratic series. Hell, even Life offered more inspired "killer monster on a spaceship" action, even though on a base level it was just Alien - why can't an actual Alien movie measure up to the damn knockoffs?
As far as the humans go, they're the usual mixed bag of recognizable character actors (Demian Bichir, Amy Seimetz, Billy Crudup) and borderline anonymous grunts, giving a mix between the first Alien's blue collar paycheck collectors and Aliens' tight squad of buddies. Character development is fleeting to the point that I didn't realize two characters were married until one cradled the other (dead one) in his arms, and probably will have better material on the Blu-ray (as did Prometheus, for the record). The nicest surprise was Danny McBride, playing the ship's pilot who only makes I think two jokes throughout the movie, shedding most if not all of his usual persona for a change (I find him to be one of those guys that always plays variations of the same character). I was also happy to see Callie Hernandez from Blair Witch as the co-pilot; she doesn't get to do much beyond challenge McBride's decisions (they're all on the ship above the storm-ravaged planet; he wants to go help the others, she wants to keep the ship safe) but it's still fun to see her go from low-budget found footage to a megabudget flick like this.
But they're led by Katherine Waterston, who the script lets down more than anyone else. Her husband is killed early on (not alien related) so she's sad, fine, but that's pretty much her one note throughout the film. And they give her Ripley-esque hair, which does her no favors as you're constantly reminded of what a better character Sigourney Weaver got to play. She barely even gets to do anything badass; Walter saves her in one action scene, McBride's character is backing her up throughout another... for a series that is iconic for its female protagonist (an Oscar nominee for Aliens, in fact - incredibly rare for genre movies at all let alone sequels) they really should have delivered more on this front. I had to double check her character name, for Christ's sake (Daniels), and I actually like Waterston from her other movies, so I can't imagine how blank she'll be to viewers who have no prior connection to her.
That said, it's really Fassbender's show, and he is terrific (as he always is). They don't interact too much, but when he's playing David and Walter in the same scene, it's electric, and it also provides the film with its most suspenseful moment as David does the fingering on a flute as he tries to teach Walter to play. I spent the entire scene sure that David was going to ram the thing through Walter's skull (or chip, I guess) to kill him, and tensed up more than I did for any of the uninspired alien scenes. But even when David is talking to other characters, he is riveting - I love how casual he is about how evil he is, and the glee he seemingly takes at taking advantage of how stupid some of these people are. There's a minor "faith vs. science" thing going on between him and Billy Crudup's character (a man of religion) that also shines, but it also seems like it got whittled to the bone, either by rewrites or a nervous studio, unsure if they were willing to allow more of these heady conversations in a summer movie about aliens. God forbid anything be interesting nowadays.
Long story short, if you want more alien action than Prometheus offered, you'll get it - but it's still very much a Prometheus movie, far more concerned with ideas about creation and man's place in the world than xenomorphs scurrying around and melting faces with its acid blood. You get those things, but even a child can probably sense the filmmaker was in a rush to get them over with so he could get back to what actually interested him. Like Prometheus, the film would probably be a lot better if it was completely disconnected from a long-running franchise; Ridley may have started it, but it became another thing, and now he's forced to serve two masters (in a time when impatient audiences won't allow him to really dig deep with the things he wants to explore). I actually liked how the Alien series always offered another filmmaker's unique approach to the material (even Paul WS Anderson), but now it's seemingly a Ridley Scott series - it's a tough thing to shake off when you're watching the movie for the first time, especially when they're seemingly promising more Alien than Prometheus by changing the title. I luck out a bit in that I've never held the original series up to as much scrutiny or obsession as say, the Halloween movies, so I can't get angry at these things like some die-hards do (AVP:R is the only one I flat out dislike, but Alien - my favorite - isn't in my top 25 movies or anything). Again, they have their weak points and their strong points, and this is no exception - it's just weird that the weaker things are the parts we ostensibly bought tickets to see.
I can't recall if it was for an article, in a conversation, or maybe just a few tweets, but a while back I listed a few "rules" for making an effective found footage movie, after growing weary of seeing so many that failed to even come close to presenting any sort of reality. I mean, sure, when you're walking into Paranormal Activity 6 you can't expect anything even remotely believable (which is the key to making these particular movies work, but what do I know? I'm just the guy laughing at the series' downfall), but standalone films really have no excuse for the sloppiness I often see. So I'm happy to say that Phoenix Forgotten gets a lot more right than it does wrong, and its only real flaw is joining a party that's essentially over. Had it come out during the format's peak in popularity (2011-ish), we might be singling it out as one of the best of the lot. Now, it's just likely to ignored, and eventually give lazy punwriters an easy mark given its unfortunate title.
The most important one of these rules is to let the viewer get sucked into the possibility that what we're watching is real. Now, I mean in a general sense - I know Ridley Scott did not produce an actual snuff film, but if they do their job, I should catch myself on occasion thinking that I'm seeing at least SOME actual footage, not an entirely fictional piece. Because if they can't do that, there's really no point to the POV aesthetic - it's limiting for the filmmakers and can be a turnoff for some viewers (motion sickness, for starters), so when handicapped from the start it baffles me that so many fail to even try to depict a naturally shot piece. Impossible cutaways, recognizable actors, overuse of CGI, people filming their own loved ones being murdered... all these sins are committed time and time again, but I saw little to none of that stuff here. In fact, given the way the movie is structured, I really believed that I was watching re-purposed footage for a while, as if filmmaker Justin Harper found someone's home movies and creatively cut them in a way that could be used as genuine backdrop for a present day story he made up.
And that leads to the second rule Harper and his crew thankfully followed - they made the movie compelling from the get-go. Far too many of these films have long buildup to brief payoffs (even some of the good ones are technically guilty of this), because there's just the one or two cameras being used on this one trip into the woods or whatever, and the movie has to hit a feature runtime but also make sure no one is too rattled to keep shooting. Phoenix finds a pretty simple but effective way around this - it splits the timeline between the present day and 1997, with the present day scenes featuring a young woman (Sophie) who is making a documentary about what happened to her brother Josh, who disappeared twenty years ago... and also liked to film his adventures. At first, we're not even sure how their story ended - we know she's trying to find out what happened to him and his two friends, but the movie doesn't straight up tell us in the present day that he was never found. We see old news footage and such about the initial search for them, but unless I missed something*, they avoid coming down hard on their status in the present day. For all we know they found the bodies, or they found the three teens but they were so haunted by whatever they saw out there that they're unable to communicate anymore. I think it's around the halfway point that we get concrete proof that they are indeed still missing (presumed dead), as until then they just keep things vague: "I want to know what happened to my brother" or things along those lines. It kind of reminded me of the show I Shouldn't Be Alive, which would depict tragedies that befell rock climbers or white water rafters or whatever - there would be a group of 3-4 people who get lost/injured, but only 1-2 of them would be telling the story so we could still be in suspense about what happened to the others.
Another thing in the movie's favor in these early scenes is that it's funny, even somewhat charming at times. Two of the kids do a little spoof of the end of Contact, the aloof dad hopes that if they saw air force planes that it's "our air force", our wannabe documentarian hero is given advice on how to be a better interviewer, etc. And when they visit a pair of UFO enthusiasts and tell them that they shot the footage that was used on the news (the lights first appeared during Sophie's birthday party, so the camera was already out), one of them says "Oh that was you? Congrats! Can you please try to focus next time?" (or something along those lines) that literally made me burst out laughing. It's an unspoken tradition for these things that the people who seemingly want to be filmmakers kind of suck at it, so it's funny to see it actually called out for once (and by a jovial old guy who is still charmed by the kids and helping them out). Likability is a problem in modern horror as a whole, and even the best FF movies tend to have obnoxious protagonists (Micah, Heather, etc.) - it's not often I find myself genuinely enjoying all of the characters in one of these things.
The movie also gives us enough clues to suggest something more grounded than aliens might be responsible for their disappearance (if anything, they kind of make the abduction possibility more of a late-game theory, as opposed to something they assume right off the bat). Josh has a crush on the girl of the group (Ashley), but it seems that she is more into his buddy Mark, who they bring along on their UFO spotting trip because he has a car and better survival skills (i.e. reading a compass). In the present day we learn that some blood and a few beer cans were found in the car, so the idea that maybe this was merely a tragic love triangle/drunken accident is teased for a bit. It's also heartbreaking when Josh's mom (in the present day) says she hopes that Ashley had feelings for him in return, as he never had a girlfriend and she wanted him to experience that in his short life - because we know she didn't, and if he is dead, then I guess he did indeed die without having any romantic encounters. Since very few of these films ever bother with a dual timeline or even present day bookends, we never get any sense of how these mysterious disappearances weigh on their loved ones, so I loved seeing this brief moment of rather gut-wrenching humanity.
Then of course there's the possibility that they saw something they shouldn't have and were disposed of in the vast desert, with drug dealers and such brought up briefly as potential theories. But the one that's given some actual weight is that old standby: government coverup. As with all UFO cases (and the Phoenix Lights sightings in 1997 really did happen, look it up if you're unfamiliar), there's always the "It was the government testing a spy plane" or whatever idea, and there is indeed an air force base near where the kids are looking for the lights to appear again. Harper smartly uses some legitimate real news footage of the governor of Arizona mocking the idea of aliens back in 1997, juxtaposed with the (also real) fact that he admitted it could have been extraterrestrial about a decade later, when he was no longer governor and thus didn't have to worry about looking silly and/or trying to keep his people from panicking. Obviously, anyone sitting in the audience "knows" it's aliens because of the trailer (and a random drug dealer would be a really underwhelming answer), but if you don't see the trailer (and I never did, for the record), the film does a fine job of keeping "alien abduction" out of your head for a surprising amount of time, by utilizing the little bits of evidence they do have to present more grounded theories.
(My initial theory: he was murdered by Fox executives, because in 1997 he somehow has a VHS copy of X-Files: Fight the Future in his bedroom. The two friends were collateral damage.)
The key to all of this "we don't know" stuff is the fact that they've only found the first tape the kids made, because the second (final?) one obviously would have been on them at the time they disappeared. So the first 45-50 minutes of the movie have a Lake Mungo-esque feel to it, as if we were watching an Unsolved Mysteries episode where they had actual footage instead of recreations. As I said, they had me believing for a while that the 1997 footage was all legit - the aspect ratio and quality changes to what they'd actually have back then (4:3 VHS quality crap), unlike Paranormal Activity 3 and some others that couldn't be bothered to try to match the proper technology for the time. And even more importantly, what we were seeing really wasn't all that unbelievable - the incident was real, and there probably IS footage shot by an adventurous teenager, running around in the local desert hoping to get more proof of it. In reality, that kid would find nothing and go home, but if a filmmaker in 2017 got access to that footage and cut it up in between newly shot (fictional) scenes of actors pretending to be related to the people in that footage, no one in the audience would be the wiser, and it'd be pretty creative to boot.
Of course, that illusion is eventually shattered when their final tape is found, thanks to a librarian who finds their damaged school camera in storage (how it got sent to them isn't spelled out, but the camera has a "Property of (whatever school it is)" sticker on it, so we can assume someone found it and mailed it to them however many years later). The tape is a bit beat up but can be played, and at this point we see it play straight through, revealing what happened to them (well, mostly, it's a single camera hampered by 1997 technology, so it's not exactly crystal clear, but that's also realistic). If there's one thing about the movie that bugged me, it's that they don't return to the present day after the footage is watched. It's treated as a reveal; she hits PLAY and then they cut to later as she is stunned by whatever was on the tape, and then she makes an inquiry at the air force base to see if they can help her explain what she saw, but they refuse to help. Then she just kind of shrugs and we watch the entire tape in full, and when it finishes the movie is over. Does she show it to her mom, or the other kids' parents? Upload it to Youtube? Finish her documentary? We just don't know. It's kind of a weird way to close it up, because the movie is presented more as her journey than his, and we kinda figure from the start that his ended in tragedy, so it would have been nice to see how things ended up in the present day.
As for that last tape, this is where the movie becomes more traditionally found footage-y: they goof off a bit, they film more than necessary, and finally they get lost. The period setting serves it well; we know they won't have GPS or cell phones (these existed in 1997, but no explanation is required for their absence - they weren't commonplace as they are now), and they just have the one camera, so 99% of the time it's Josh's POV, allowing us to never forget whose POV we're seeing (a major issue with many FF films, especially Blair Witch 3 and pretty much any one about ghost hunters). But they justify the continued filming in a way I don't think I've heard before - when the obligatory group member goes missing, the other two keep shooting landmarks, so they can retrace their steps in the morning (rather than run in circles looking for him in the dark, they decide to keep moving in order to find help). And we get answers for the blood and beer cans, so that has its own small charms when we discover the actual context for their existence. I mean, if you're sick to death of these movies I don't think there's anything in this segment that will change your mind, but take it from this "expert" - they do way more right than wrong here.
Apparently, it's all for naught as far as box office goes, as the film is expected to only gross a mere $2m this weekend, which is pathetic for a film opening on 1500+ screens (to compare, Blair Witch Project sold about that many tickets on its opening weekend - which was in only 27 theaters). It's not the film's fault; I think the audience is just burned on this sub-genre for the time being, and it's not quite ready for a revival, even if the movie delivers the goods (though I should stress it's not particularly scary; unlike Blair Witch Project's strange noises and such throughout, it's really only the last five minutes that put the movie in the "scary movie" genre, as it's otherwise basically a straight up mystery documentary). Hopefully it will find its audience on home video and VOD down the line, but even if not I hope they can take some solace knowing that they won me over - I'm as tired of these movies as anyone, and was not expecting to enjoy it (I don't go into a movie HOPING to hate it, I just didn't think there would be anything to hook me in. I was really only going because I hadn't updated the site all week and had time to see it before work). But it didn't take long for me to realize that they actually thought the POV aesthetic through and knew how to keep the audience engaged without cheating or breaking any semblance of "reality", and remained largely free and clear of the genre's usual pitfalls. Good job, folks - sorry about all the shitty ones over the past couple years that apparently have audiences unwilling to give yours a chance.
What say you?
*Very possible, as the theater skipped their usual 20 minutes of trailers due to a technical issue, starting the movie "early" (a few minutes past its actual listed time). I had to wait for them to brew coffee, because god forbid they ever make it before being reminded, so when I walked into the theater expecting trailers, I saw the movie was already on. It doesn't seem like I missed anything of note (it couldn't have been on for more than 30-60 seconds), but it's possible there was some text at the top that clearly stated their status in 2017.
