I like found footage and I cannot lie,
them other movies can’t deny,
than when a shaky cam and a screaming girl
jump around on screen you just wanna HURL!
#CameraGotShakes!
Synopsis:
While on a French vacation funded by odd jobs, an aspiring influencer covertly films a vlog in a reportedly haunted chateau she’s been hired to clean.
IMDb: 3.9
Rotten Tomatoes: N/A
Writer/Director Luke Genton (The Bell Keeper) shot this on an IPhone 14, which always amazes me the quality of that stuff. Cathy Marks (Young and the Restless, Scream Queens, American Horror Story) stars as the lead.
I love found footage. But it’s become the new slasher film. Which became the new zombie film. Like, back in the day, people realized slasher films were getting popular and were cheap to make, so they made a ton of them, oversaturating the market. Then it was zombie films. Now, it’s found footage or shot on video. There are a ton of cheapies out there, and some are good and some are bad.
Which one is this? Well, let’s discuss this. First off, have you seen Deadstream? This YouTube-type guy spends the night live streaming from a haunted house. If you have, this sounds familiar, because a very vanilla (think Tina in Return of the Living Dead — no wait, don’t think of that classic and then watch this) vlogger from America is in Paris, struggling to get views and be creative, so her and her main squeeze go to the Murder Castle to do ghost hunting. They fake it and then — surprise, shit gets real!
This is full of all kinds of false scares (you think something will happen and then it’s just a gardener), then the lame jump scares are supposed to scare you once you get immune to the fake ones. But it doesn’t really work. The dude is a bit of a him-bo frat type guy and she’s so goody too shoes that I hate her guts. I kind of want them to die.
In Deadstream, though, I wanted old boy to live. I mean, he was a funny douche who seemed like a good guy that respected the ghosts. These two are a bit like Micah in Paranormal Activity. All that said, the movie is really well done. The acting is fine. The ghosts look good. The shaky camera doesn’t make me want to scream. And it gets kind of creepy about halfway through once all the annoying stereotypical ghost YouTube video shit is over.
At only 83 minutes, you might be tempted to turn it off around the 45 minute mark when you’ve had enough of the stupidity, but then it kind of gets dark. There’s a subplot with the mother that evokes some Zelda in Pet Sematary vibes. You start seeing shit in the background. The music starts to get good. There are some really great drone shots that truly encapsulate the Murder Castle setting (The Chateau Haute Jaure in Bergerac, France which is being renovated into a wedding video), which is truly a wonderful location to shoot a horror movie about ghosts.
Of course, we have the whole, “why are you still shooting with the camera and why are you not spending more effort to live and not vlog?” And the other, “why don’t you leave if you’re scared?” Like I always say with Jaws, if you’re scared, get out of the fucking ocean. Go to a swimming pool. Here, if you’re watching your footage and see weird shit, get the fuck out of there.
But give it a chance. It’s a low budget cheap horror film that’s a pretty little decent found footage movie. It is nothing spectacular, and nothing cutting edge, nor something original. But it does what it does decently enough. And my kids covered their eyes and said, “nope,” several times, so that should count for something!
5.75/10 Stab Wounds
