2025 Horror Part Fourteen

undertone
Dir - Ian Tuason
Overall: MEH 

Promising yet flawed, writer/director Ian Tuason's frugal debut undertone alludes to a better movie than it is, doing as much correctly as it does incorrectly.  Shot in the filmmaker's parent's home with only two actors on screen and all for a measly $500,000, Tuason kicks things off with a wonderful first act that takes its time, keeps the manipulative and tuneless music to a bare minimum, and establishes a humorless tone that never lets up.  It seems like the entire story may play out in real time as Nina Kiri cares for her invalid mother who is moments away from delivering her death rattle, frets over her recent pregnancy diagnosis, seems indifferent to her absent boyfriend, and sits down to do presumably her only job which is recording a paranormal podcast with her cohort, (whose voice is provided by Adam DiMarco).  We can only speculate if the film could have bypassed some of its issues if it simply continued on this trek where Kiri and DiMarco listen to spooky recordings sent by an anonymous email in the wee hours of the night while those tapes start to invade their reality.  Instead, Tuason inexplicably breaks up the flow by returning to the same set up over days while broadening out the story with laughably tripe cliches.  In this sense, the film would have underwhelmed anyway once we see where it all goes, (an ancient European demon with a goofy name, backwards children's songs, nightmare sequences with wide-mouthed faces screaming, a treasure trove of arbitrary supernatural bits that Kiri sleepwalks through without hardly ever seeming concerned enough to notify anyone, etc), but Tuason nevertheless shows potential.  Some of the moments on their own are presented in a bone-chilling fashion, but the script is hackneyed and the movie ultimately just does any ole thing it wants as it staggers towards a predictably ambiguous conclusion.

BODYCAM

Dir - Brandon Christensen

Overall: MEH

What is worse, a cheap found footage movie whose horror tactics are insultingly tripe, or a cheap found footage movie that is trying to say something meritable about the real world, yet whose horror tactics are still insultingly tripe?  The latest from the sibling duo of Brandon and Ryan Christensen, Bodycam has a satisfactory premise where two police officers investigate a distress call in a derelict neighborhood and everything is captured on, (you guessed it), their bodycams.  This automatically solves the found footage conundrum of "Why are they filming this?", and it also gives the set-up some cultural legs.  In an era where police brutality is caught on such devices and many citizens have voiced their frustrations with the unfortunately short-sighted, (or even worse), prejudice, and deplorable behavior of certain law enforcement officials when on the job, it is a nifty idea to see what would happen in such a context when all gory supernatural hell breaks loose.  Wisely, Jaime M. Callica and Sean Rogerson are not painted as flatlined stereotypes, though they are underwritten due to a seventy-five minute running time that barrels full-throttle through its set pieces.  Sadly, these set pieces are front-to-back lazy, with loud monster noises, dilapidated locations, characters standing motionless until they open their mouths widely or tilt their heads or lunge at the camera screaming, occult symbols all over the place, everyone ending back at the same house despite how the laws of physics work, and worst of all, a demonic CGI entity with its own set of loathsome followers.  Take the bare bones concept and do it in a completely different manner while omitting all the hackneyed garbage that we have seen a zillion times, and there may be something here.

EXIT 8
Dir - Genki Kawamura
Overall: GOOD

The cliche with video game movies is that they are A), almost never good and B), redundant at best because the kind of immersion that works in the game does not translate to a feature.  Pleasantly then, co-writer/director Genki Kawamura's adaptation of the Kotake Create game Exit 8 is an exception, creating an unexplained and otherworldly Möbius strip loop that builds on frustration in the hope of leading to some form of redemption.  The second full-length and first horror work from Kawamura, he takes on an ambitious project where nearly every second of its ninety-five minute run time takes place within four hallways in an underground subway tunnel, a small crop of characters endlessly getting looped around when they cannot follow the rules properly.  These mistakes do not just cause them to break down in fits or reach for their asthma inhalers in hopeless annoyance, but it also takes a toll on their souls.  As the main "Lost Man" protagonist, Kazunari Ninomiya is equal parts exhausted puppy and freaked-out pedestrian as he wrestles with the supernatural maze, facing obstacles that pertain to his own personal life.  This proves to be something that gives the story a dramatic edge over the more bare bones source material.  In other words, the film enhances the video game concept instead of merely rehashing it in an unsatisfactory manner.  It just so happens that it tosses in some elaborate long takes and wonderfully creepy and confounding moments along the way, all the while keeping the claustrophobic setting and relentless repetition from growing stagnant.