shadowfever

An entire town disappeared from an Island on the Mississippi River where Elly Thompson grew up. At age 5 she was with her father when he disappeared, an event that she witnessed but did not understand. She has returned to the area as a documentary filmmaker, and along with her film crew, attempts to find answers. Apparently the others have no knowledge of her personal history with the river. As time goes on we learn that everyone has their own personal fears to deal with. I really hated giving this movie such a low score. I liked the story, thought it was competently directed, and should have been much more watchable than it was. My problems: First, the sound was all over the place. Dialogue that you could barely hear, with Foley and background noises that blew you out of your seat if you turned the volume up enough to hear what was being said. Silverware on the table, footsteps, and oars in the water should not be louder than the spoken word. And even the dialogue rose and fell in volume, from too much to almost inaudible. Please, go back and redo your post work and balance the sound. Or, add subtitles so we can turn the sound off and still know what the characters are saying. Second, the colors were washed out. This may have been intentional and was probably effective for dream sequences and actual documentary footage. But the whole movie shouldn't have been so drained of color in my opinion. Too much of it was made to look like "found" footage when it wasn't. There was more color in the final scenes of the movie than in the earlier hundred minutes combined. If I missed the point of that, or if my copy was just a bad transfer, then I apologize. Third: about 20 minutes too long. Unfortunately many low, low budget filmmakers are so enamored with their masterpiece that they feel that it can't be trimmed. They are usually wrong. They take what could have been a taut thriller and make it drag on and on. Shortening would have added tension and probably made the movie easier to follow. As I said, I hate to give this such a low rating. It could easily have been a 6 or even a 7, especially considering it's low budget roots. But the sound, more than anything else, effectively ruined it.

The premise was interesting, a search for Michael Rockefeller who disappeared in the jungles of New Guinea in 1961. Tying a story, especially a horror story, to an actual historic event intrigues me. Like adding Ambrose Bierce to Dusk til Dawn (3) or Edgar Allan Poe to any number of films it adds an extra dimension to the whole spirit of suspension of disbelief; and then to add cannibals to the mix without taking them out of their natural element is like icing on the cake.

Then it falls apart. When is this "found camera" fad going to go away. It is a filming technique that worked once, 40 years ago in Cannibal Holocaust, but has fallen on hard times. After a while the shaky camera thing gets irritating. And when you add in the Blair Witch stylings; the whiny, bitchy filmmakers who are more interested in themselves than the thing they are documenting, then things go from bad to worse.

Too much of the dialogue and storyline seemed improvised. Rather than adding character depth or an interesting plot development, it only took 1 dimensional characters and made them even more uninteresting and unlikeable.

Some of the cinematography was good, though some was too dark (intentional perhaps but grating non the less), and there were some beautiful location shots. The impaled "girl on a stick" scene, lifted from Cannibal Holocaust, was impressive. Okay, that is pretty much the extent of it's finer points.

As to the aforementioned suspension of disbelieve, it requires an involvement in the story to work, and that wasn't present. These weren't professional documentary filmmakers with a "get the shot no matter what" mentality. They were spoiled 20 something or others who would have dropped the camera and run for their lives at the first sign of danger. The danger that came, by the way, in the last 30 minutes or so. Up until then it was all the kind of self indulgence that one would expect from from these two particular couples taking videos of their journey. In other words, trite nonsense that has nothing to do with either the documentation of the search nor true progression of the story.

They did keep it fairly realistic in that they didn't show what the cameras would not have shown. Bodies dragged out of view of the lens, killings happening out of sight, etc. Unfortunately that meant that most of the really good scenes occurred off camera. So, realistic yes, boring, double yes. In other words, show me the blood and gore. In low budget horror filmmaking when you are working without tension, acting, or reason, then you have to make up for it with some added gore and a little T & A. Consider that my gratuitous gratuity to the genre.

If you have to continue in the "found camera" vein then do it with a new twist. Maybe a filmmaker who finds the footage and then attempts to recreate it in his or her own film with perhaps horrifying repercussions. Then we can use a few bouncing camera shots and then move on to some decent filmmaking.

I love low budget horror. I even love bad low budget horror. But when I see a film that actually had potential, let down by poor execution by people who should know better, I feel nothing but regret.