Thursday, September 6, 2012

Area 407

Area 407 just frost my jimmies I tell you and I am going to tell you.  Oh, there will be spoilers so consider yourself warned.  Usually a bad film doesn't annoy me.  I get more often than not a little sad that some young film makers screwed their chance, but not this time.

It only took five seconds as well.

Area 407 is a found footage film so you know already half of what you are in for.  Shakey cams and cheap scare moments.  The particular of the plot is that a bunch of meatbags are in a plane and then the plane goes down and goes bang.  Before you can say "Lost" the plane came down in two halves so of course of the survivors want to find the other half so they go off stumbling in the dark.

What can go wrong?

Well, being a horror movie the answer is "a lot."  It isn't too long before there are screams of people and growls from something else.  Something big, and obviously camera shy since even when people are snatched right in the camera frame its done in a way so you can't see the beasties.  Now I don't want to be a nit picker, but there are several times where we are suppose to believe the beasties are dragging people into the dark.  The problem was I could at several times see the feet of the people so unless the beastie was  invisible it was obvious  they were being dragged by a rope.

Anyway, the shrinking number of survivors find several shacks and army surrplus.  They even find some army folk but they are as nearly shy as the beasties.  It's like our poor survivors have cooties.  So the military over a radio give them the run around and the old "Stay calm" speech.  The survivors are not staying calm specially one fellow who tried awfully hard to annoy the rest to the point that they would shot him over the beasties.

Ok, now the spoiler.  I spent my time watching this film with a growing sense of boredom.  Screaming your head off and running in the dark will only get you so far.  I kept watching though because films like this generally have a reveal at the end and I wanted to see what the beastie looked like.  Now right before the last survivors get killed by a government agent but that didn't  bother me too much.  In a film of cheap scares a cheap downer ending wasn't out of place.  Then the agent looks behind him and the beastie got him.  And what was it?  Oh just a dinosaur done in the cheapest Syfy level CGI.  A dinosaur?  You know if you are going to tease me for an hour an half you better do more than a dinosaur.  I just finished watching the cheapest possible version of Jurassic Park.  No actors, no sets, no script to speak of, and five seconds of special effects.  So yeah it only took five seconds to get my goat, frost my jimmies and throw my plush cthulhu at the screen.

So you have been warned.

1 comment:

  1. Love your review style when you are either pumped up over a film or pissed off about it!! Keep 'em coming Lazarus!

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