Dir - Chris Sparling
Overall: MEH
A frustrating mockumentary that mixes ill-suited performances, daft plotting, and derivative supernatural details, writer/director Christ Sparling's sophomore effort and first in the horror camp The Atticus Institute gradually loses its audience with its shoddy presentation. Usually for a fake documentary to work, it is imperative that a cast of unknowns is utilized, but seeing actors who are prolific enough to have their own Wikipedia pages all engage in talking head interviews and faux archival footage makes for a difficult pill to swallow. Worse are the unintentionally schlocky performances, especially from said interview segments which are hilariously melodramatic and ergo unconvincing. The period-set, 1970s footage fares better to a point and has a fittingly grainy aesthetic, but much of it is too cinimatically staged to work and again, the actors are frequent to convey B-movie camp instead of docudrama realism. Poor Rya Kihlstedt's portrayal amounts to nothing more than a caricature of "possessed woman in horror flicks", contorting her body in a demonically aloof haze, with frequent outbursts of obnoxious screaming thrown in for jump scare purposes. A swing and a miss, its earlier moments at least convey some intriguing dread, be it the kind that ultimately results in a missed opportunity.
Dir - Mickey Keating
Overall: WOOF
The sophomore effort Pod from independent filmmaker Mickey Keating is a maddening bombardment of horrendously obnoxious characters giving themselves aneurysms while screaming at each other as one jump scare and deafening noise bombards the proceedings after another. Meant to be a high-octane science-fiction thriller except done on a minuscule budget, the story concerns a raving, mentally ill asshole isolating himself in the woods while his just as annoying siblings attempt an intervention without believing a word that he says until of course it is way too late. Things go from bad to worse as the intimate, hand-held camera never sits still, the foaming-at-the-mouth arguing never stops, and the blaring sound design should legally qualify as a hate crime. As unwatchable as it is hackneyed and derivative, Keating's steadfast collaborator in Larry Fessenden eventually brings some schlocky charm to the proceedings which while appreciated, is far too little too late and also jives incorrectly with the deadly serious tone. It is yet one more element to a messy whole, but at least the whole thing is only an hour and eighteen minutes and the alien monster looks halfway decent for the couple of seconds where it is on screen.
Dir - Brian James O'Connell
Overall: MEH
There are a couple of laughs to be had in Brian James O'Connell's R-rated chuckles-fest Bloodsucking Bastards, an Office Space meets Shaun of the Dead hybrid with vampires. Suffering from the common ailment of many contemporary indie comedies, almost every character is annoyingly quirky sans Fran Kranz' unassuming everyman and his ex played by Emma Fitzpatrick who serve as the only two people on screen that are yanking their hair out at the outrageous predicament that everyone else either takes in stride or is too busy indulging in their eccentricities to notice. There are far worse offenders of this faulty trope where one guy is normal and everyone else is goofy instead of the other way around, but it does lend itself to a mixed bag of nyuck nyucks where some of them hit while others are painfully lazy and predictable. Thankfully, O'Connell goes for crass laughs, with a cartoonish amount of blood splatter, frequent sex, masturbation, and porn jokes, plus the usual amount of cubicle-based humor where nobody takes their job seriously except for the hard working ones who cannot seem to catch a break in their department. Throwing the undead into the mix is as good of an idea as any, but the plotting is flimsy at best and the agenda would probably play out just the same if the script by Sean Cowhig, Neil Garguilo, and Ryan Mitts utilized any other movie monster besides the one that it went with.
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