(2005)
Dir - John Gulager
Overall: MEH
The result of Project Greenlight's third season winner, Feast is the debut from director John Gulager and his writing team of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton. Unfortunately, this same creative force would go on to work on various levels of crap, such as entries into the Saw series and two more Feast sequels. Essentially a B-movie with a highly recognizable cast, (Balthazar Getty, Krista Allen, Judah Frielander, Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes, etc), the movie is mostly "memorable" for ushering in some fresh new exciting ways to ruin a horror movie. For one, the cinematography and camera work is utterly awful. For literally every action sequence, (and there are plenty), it is hardly possible to distinguish what at all you are looking at due to the spastic camera movement and laughably poor lighting. Everything is ridiculously dark and shaky to a major fault. Besides some generally amusing title cards for each character, the humor fails everywhere else. None of the character's personalities are remotely explored so their random rants, speeches, or jokey jabs all come off as bizarre, out of place, and furthermore, not funny. The film also makes the common-for-some-reason mistake of trying to be as schlocky as possible while still having moments like a woman suffering a mental breakdown because her son gets eaten alive right in front of her. So in other words, it is a fun monster movie folks!
(2007)
Dir - Mikael Håfström
Overall: MEH
Majorly funded, (The Weinstein Company), A-list cast, (John Cusak, Samuel L. Jackson), Stephen King adaptations are a hit-or-miss ordeal surely and 2007's 1408 reeks of "studio created popcorn horror", but not in a numbingly unpleasant way. King's initial story here is somewhat retreaded territory, but still plenty creepy as he milks the scary hotel/author protagonist premise yet again. The concept of a single, " evil fucking room", in a hotel that goes all trying-to-kill-you-fairly-quickly within an hours time is a solid concept to be sure. Swedish director Mikael Håfström, (who also did the fun 2013, Stallone/Schwarzenegger throwback vehicle Escape Plan), handles the material here decent enough to a point. As the hauntings get more and more aggressive though, the film kind of flies off the rails in a blatant attempt to have a huge finish of an ending. Going the route of subtlety would have certainly been more creepy, but also less action packed and exciting for movie-goers, hence the bigger studio vibe overtaking the proceedings. Several endings where shot, (usually not a good idea), and the one shown in the theaters is the preferable one compared to the awful original cut which finds Jackson awkwardly crashing a funeral and seeing ghosts in his rear-view mirror.
(2008)
Dir - Joel Anderson
Overall: GOOD
One of the better documentary-style found footage films in the horror camp is Australian Joel Anderson's minimally budgeted Lake Mungo. Many things can go wrong with this type of affair. The acting can be unconvincing during the interview segments, which is even more problematic since said segments make up almost the entire running time in this format. Thankfully the cast keeps it together here with only the most minimal, eye-ball-rolling dialog present. The other uphill battle faced is that seeing a finished re-telling of a story in this way means that we know that all of the people who are recounting the events ultimately come out OK in the end. This issue is bypassed though as the film solely deals with one doomed character and the struggle her family members have afterwards. The would-be scary moments are staged well, all of them involving slow zoom-ins to photographs or video footage after we are told that the camera "caught something". Anderson does a swell job of making these occasions consistently interesting as opposed to tedious. All that said, the movie is scarcely frightening and has a few too many unnecessary "twists" in its story progression. The plight of Alice Palmer is noticeably parallel in a few respects to Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks fame, (even outside of the obvious nod in the last name), though it is not successfully conveyed how troubled she was before things go down, with some of the big reveals coming off more random than they should.
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