Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Baghead (2008, Jay and Mark Duplass)

Somehow looking as though it was on a tighter budget than Blair Witch, the Duplass Brothers' Baghead offers a few charms along the way, but feels pretty incomplete as a horror movie. Which, I know, I know, it's not strictly a Horror Movie-- it's just, I have a big problem with the movie's scares being so effective, only to be completely negated by an 11th-hour plot twist. Same reason Shyamalan pissed me off so much with the Village, really: it ratcheted up superb tension with those groundhogs or whatever, only to find out that the filmmakers pretty much peed in my cereal.

Not to do Baghead the disservice of comparing it to bad Shyamalan (a sadly redundant phrase these days). The cabin-in-the-woods setting allows for some sort of sense of dread to build up, although that's mostly because we're aware that we're watching four friends go to a cabin in the woods, which the likes of Evil Dead and Cabin Fever have taught us not to do.

Sexual tensions abound, and there's lots of friendly blather-- character-rounding, I suppose, but there comes a point when it gets boring (exception: Steve Zissis as Chad-- what a good role, deserving of a more proficient film that can better capture his nuances). But when the masked boogeyman shows up, for those tantalizingly short moments that he does-- it's genuinely creepy, and the reactions captured on camera seem real, devoid of Hollywood's histrionics. Unfortunately, the shadowy lurker only shows up for about 20 of the film's final 30 minutes-- a sad waste, that.

The film's inaudible and filmed on the super-cheap. As a result, a lot of dialogue and reaction shots are lost, and the movie becomes a bit confusing when someone's not screaming. A shame, that-- there are some fantastic moments here. But they're too few and far between, and when an 80-minute film drags, it's typically not a good sign.

Rating: ** (out of five)

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