No.262 : Willow Creek (2013)

Willow Creek at the IMDb

A cheap film doesn’t have to be a bad film, but a lack of budget certainly doesn’t help. If you had forty bucks and an old DVD of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ you could make a serviceable remake of ‘Willow Creek’ and still have enough for pizza on the way home.

The film was made in 2013 by when ‘found footage’ films were already old hat. I was drawn to this one however as it had the shouty comedian BobCat Goldthwait as the writer/director and it was based on a hunt for the legendary Bigfoot. So far so good.

Alas it doesn’t pan out well and it’s a dull, annoying and frankly forgettable waste of your time.

Our two heroes Jim and Kelly are on a mission to make a documentary about their quest to track the Bigfoot. The first half hour is taken up with scene setting - or padding the 80 minute run time - you decide. The two poor actors, whom I haven’t seen in anything else, look awkward as they try to improvise around real Bigfoot attractions in Trinity Forest area. We chuckle as they make a story around a Bigfoot mural, titter as they eat a big foot burger and lose interest as they make rude gestures at a Bigfoot statute.

Some unfortunate locals are dragged in to be ‘interviewed’ on camera and it seems an age before things even get near the action. We get a couple of hints about what lies ahead as Jim casually notes bullet holes in the park sign and a hillbilly local warns them off visiting their goal - the site of the famous Bigfoot cine film from 1967. A ‘Lost person’ poster is also noted but that’s bound to be irrelevant…

Obviously, they pay no heed to the dire warnings and drive deep into the forest only to be greeted by another redneck who invites them to have a coffee at ‘The Fuck Off Café’. As delightful as it sounds they decline and wander into the woods with their packs, but with no obvious means of navigation. After a needless scene of male nudity they bed down for the night - but it’s going to be a long night - for all of us!

A 20 minute scene follows with the two of them in a tent reacting to sounds outside. Bigfoot is known for banging bits of wood together (apparently) so there is lots of that and of rocks hitting their tent. This could be seen as a master class in tension building and bravura minimalist film making. Not by me however, it was totally tiresome!

Next day they wander about for a day, still lost, but finding hairs and large footprints along the way. Will they escape (er, found footage film, genius!) and will we at least get the monster money shot?!

It beggars belief that this film got a release. IMDb says it was shot in 5 days so they must have had at least four and a half off by my count.

It follows the found footage template to the letter with the only surprise being we get no pay off apart from a fat lass in the nip and a camera dragged through some grass. ‘Harry and the Hendersons’ this was not  - you’d get more monster in my underpants!

The improvisation and amateur interviews were terrible and the leads had no chemistry at all. At one point the bloke proposed marriage - I half expected the woman to say ‘sorry, who are you again?’.

There was almost no tension and that which there was, was falsely earned as it went nowhere. It didn’t make a lick of sense and had no laughs or horror to speak of. In one scene Jim finds a big pile of steaming shit and gets all exited about it - unfortunately I was unable to replicate this emotion with the film, despite their similarities.

Best Bit : Have a coffee in the Fuck Off Café.
‘W’ Rating 7/23

No.243 : World War Dead : The Rise of the Fallen (2015)

World War Dead : The Rise of the Fallen at the IMDb

Towards the end of this British ‘found footage’ horror one of the soon to be scoffed characters does an earnest piece to camera. “This is the craziest shit I’ve ever experienced” he says. Well, he’s half right - it certainly was shit!

Of course, with a title like this one you can’t expect much and it certainly delivers nothing at all, except for a series of predictable jerky encounters with some out of focus and anachronistic solder zombies.

Still I’m getting ahead of myself - let’s do the plot - that should cover a sentence! The film opens with some captions and stock footage about the Battle of the Somme - neat way to pad the already skinny 75 minute run time. We learn that a distinguished documentary film maker (who seemingly works out of a Transit van with a bunch of amateurs) has gone missing and what follows is cut from footage that was later found. So far so very predictable.

The characters have none to speak of and they all bitch about each other and argue pointlessly to either build up the tension or to disguise the fact that there is no script and that the zombie extras have only been paid for 20 minutes. The shoot is interrupted when mysterious figures appear in the background and a ‘French’ passer-by advises that it is ‘tres dangerous’ to be in the area.

There are plenty of false starts before the expert starts pulling on a chain that was next to a lake. This reveals a skeleton which belongs to a soldier from an African regiment who practiced bringing the dead back to life. He has a handy amulet in his stomach which the expert pockets, oblivious to its deadly powers! In no time flat the crew is besieged by resurrected soldiers from the Somme battlefield who strangely seem to be wearing World War 2 uniforms. They also have a taste for flesh which is unexplained apart from that’s what zombies do, I guess.

Some of the cast get chomped and another lot find an abandoned, but curiously well stocked, bunker and plot their salvation. Some handy 100 year old dynamite may help their fight and if they can rebury the skeleton (which wasn’t buried in the first place), maybe the dead will rest again. Can’t fault logic like that!

This was a shocker of a film and in no way is that a compliment. For starters I’ll bet the whole thing was filmed in England with one stuck on number plate and a dreadful ‘local’ the only nods to the actual location of the Somme battlefield. To be fair there is no way rubbish like this would get permission to film there, and if that’s the case you have to wonder about the inclusion of old footage of real and dead soldiers from the time. Regular readers will know PC isn’t my thing but real dead soldiers being used to set the scene for this tosh was plain disrespectful.

The acting was ghastly, as was the script which I don’t doubt was improvised throughout. The jerky cameras were vomit inducing and the added crackles and interference offered only annoyance, not authenticity. Very little was done in the was of explaining the zombies’ motivation or the fact that after 100 years the only decay they exhibited was that pasty face make up that students do at Halloween.

The only scares were of the usual ‘jump out’ variety allied to a screech on the soundtrack which wore thin the first time, never mind the fifth.

OK it’s hokey garbage with no pretense at great art or even competent movie making, but this was an embarrassment to all concerned not to mention an affront to common decency in general.

Best Bit - Head gets pulled off
‘W’ Rating 3/23