Daylight

I keep a personal movie inventory where I rank movies and categorize them in good, average, and bad buckets. Daylight has the honor of being at the very bottom of my bad category (and I like found footage films), even behind a flick called "Primal Rage" that makes Bigfoot an archer(!) That's saying something.

DAYLIGHT starts off like many other found footage movies, with a person narrating after-the-fact on several deaths and disappearances that happened around a house; followed by the showing of footage found on location.

However, what starts off as a deceptively simple story about a high school girl for whom a team of three child protective services workers is investigating the possibility of child abuse sprawls out in multiple directions, so that by the time everything is said and done, the plot subsumes stories concerning each of the three members of the CPS team, involving three separate priests and three different girls, their families and one boy, all centered on demonic possession.

Apparently, the original cut was three hours long, and it does not surprise me at all. The released cut, about half as long, compresses all the different plotlines to such an extent that I dare anyone to make sense of the plot on first viewing.

The matter is not helped by the fact that in the second half the pace becomes noticeably more hectic and confusing due to intermixing of different footage and various distortion effects. It is done to such an extent that it makes me wonder whether the film-makers tried to confuse the audience on purpose.

Since this mitigated my enjoyment of the movie, I was getting ready to give the film a low rating, despite the decent production values and acting.

But then, during the last 15 minutes, the movie suddenly went into an unexpected high-paced quasi-surrealistic tour de force, which led me to revise my view positively.

The final 15-minute sequence does not really clear up matters and may even introduce new confusions, but when it is just taken in as a sort of rapid-fire "stream of consciousness" procession of events without worrying too much about what it all means, it actually becomes quite enjoyable. At any rate, it is not like the audience was not already told at the beginning what will happen to all these people.

So this is a found footage movie that I think can be quite polarizing. I ended up kind of liking it overall, but I can understand the view of those who hate it with a passion.

"Daylight" is another tedious entry in the micro-budget, c-horror "found footage" sub-genre. I happen to really enjoy these kinds of films and have viewed and reviewed many dozens of them over the last couple of years. This one is, unfortunately pretty typical of majority of these weekend-shoot videos. The acting is what you'd expect from a community college drama course and is often distractingly worse (the kind of acting that makes it seem like they are reading from the script for the first time). This makes it difficult to watch this one all the way through (esp as it just seemed to drone on and on...), but I think to review a film, you need to watch it all the way, just to be fair. Anyway, there were ZERO SCARES (in fact, nothing even remotely interesting in that regard - it was almost like a very long, very bland documentary instead of a horror film), and the plot was the standard dull fare for a supernatural/"demonic" storyline. I think the writers and directors intended some kind of psychological component but couldn't quite decide what kind of film they wanted to make. There's no mystery to the story, no intellectual subtext - it's just a haphazard effort that lacked cohesion and any kind of suspense- building on any level, ultimately. So, unfortunately, I wasted $5 on this rental (which is actually a pretty high price of admission when compared to most other films in this sub-genre on Amazon Instant) - which is a lot to throw away on a rental. Hopefully, this review will save you some money and time, as I definitely can't recommend this one. Really the only positives for this one are the use of quite good editing software (if heavily overused, esp with regard to the usual "found footage" camera flutters and video distortion) and graphics, high quality HD cameras, they did provide at least a full-length movie (though again that was a plus and a minus), the lack of tedious background music (so common to these kinds of films) and some kinda cool DVD cover artwork, which actually sold me on renting this clunker. I just want to save the viewing public from wasting their money, despite the phony reviews posted by family and friends of the filmmakers eager to earn some of their investment back.

Daylight seems to be, at first glance, a run-of-the-mill found footage film, rife with lots of running around (both at night AND during the day, because why not?), shaky hand-held camera work with gratuitous glitching from the editing room, several characters who insist on running said camera for every conceivable moment of their day (which they try and justify, but I mean, come on), and performances from actors which aren't terrible, per se, but which certainly won't win any Academy Awards.

But while accomplishing all of that, Daylight achieves something very, very different, and something that probably doesn't jive with a lot of self-proclaimed "horror buffs." The problem here is that I don't feel like Daylight, at its core, is really a horror film. There are no crap-your-pants scares, no ghastly exorcisms or CG ghouls flying around, and no over-the-top gore to appease those with bloodlust. Instead, Daylight is a slow-burn thriller spiced with the ingredients of a standard horror but couched in a formula that borders on art house, and the result is nothing short of intriguing.

The entire first half of the film, in fact, is nothing more than a crime investigation, which takes a couple of viewings just to sort out who's who and exactly why and how they all seem to know each other. But it's certainly not boring. Act 2 definitely tests one's patience and attention skills, as the chronological timeline goes haywire, and the story takes off in a different direction, which begins to amp up as the characters (and the narrative) start to get a little crazy. If nothing else, the film is worth sticking around for the last ten minutes, where the directors (there are 3 of them?) seem to have thrown the rules of filmmaking out the window and conceived of something that really cannot be explained, but is totally unexpected and amazingly insane and was a huge part of why I went back to watch the whole movie over again. And then again. And probably will again.

So would I suggest this movie to everybody I know? Probably not. At least not to anyone looking for cheap scares and mindless entertainment. There are plenty of other places to find that. But if you're looking for a dark, haunting, cerebral sort of experience, then you should definitely check this one out.

OK, where do I begin! I watch movies every day, every genre from blockbuster to micro budget. I will watch practically anything from start to finish, even if it is awful! This film, DAYLIGHT, left me staring at the screen saying WTF just happened! Very loose plot, too many characters to keep up with, awful camera work (found footage motion sickness job) and a story that just goes to hell. I have no idea what the point of this film was, and Im pretty sure the director took some acid half way through filming because there is no way anyone in there right mind would have taken a movie in the direction this one took! Maybe you have to have some serious chemicals ingested in order to understand this film! Wow, Im still actually shaking my head at what I've just seen!