Technically, This is Not a Test is a decent movie. The teens taking shelter in their school as zombies swarm their small town led by Olivia Holt and Corteon Moore bring a lot of soul and humanity to yet another in a very, very long line of zombie apocalypse movies. The very little FX there are eye-catching and are suitably gory. Although things get a little too shaky at times during the action, chase scenes, Director and writer Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket, Backcountry, Slasher – Seasons Third and Fourth) is up for the task. Then, why is This is Not A Test only an average movie? It is because like its TV counterpart The Walking Dead, the focus is squarely on the human drama not on the horror and it doesn’t bring anything new to the genre. You’ve seen this all before with better characterizations on a far larger scale.
Watch: VOD, Theatres
Cold Storage is not what you think it might be based on the misleading trailer. If you are hoping for Dawn of the Dead in a storage facility, you will be greatly disappointed. It takes approximately 60 minutes of the film’s 90 minute run-time before our main characters confront any kind of undead. There is an encounter at the start of the movie but it is so brief it doesn’t amount to much. This is a whole of nothing with some emptiness sprinkled in.
Watch: Theatres
Re/Member: The Last Night is the sequel to 2022’s Re/Member which was based on the manga Karada Sagashi. Like This Is Not a Test, we have a group of high school students who are trapped by circumstances beyond their control. The difference is…One, these students are Japanese so they are polite, respectful and don’t act like a bunch of assholes and two, they are hunted and haunted by the ghost of a dead child. Like the first film, this is The Grudge meets Groundhog Day. The kids are forced to relive the same day over and over again scouring an amusement park searching for the body parts of the murdered child in order to end a curse. If they are all killed by the vengeful spirit before they locate all the hidden parts the day loops back to the start resurrecting them all to possibly be killed again. The hook of the sequel is the love birds from the original film return to coach the new kids on the block but not in the way you might expect. The filmmakers have a lot more fun, inject a lot more humour into this entry and the FX are far superior than whatever that was which ended the last film.
Watch: Both films are on Netflix.
As I have stated a million times by now, I am NOT a fan of the Found Footage horror genre. There are a few exceptions like The WNUF Halloween Special and V/H/S/Halloween but for the most part they come off as phony to me with the filmmakers employing lots of “cheats” or bending their own rules a lot. It shatters the realism when the characters keep filming when they are in immediate danger or they catch important plot points on film when there would be no reason to anticipate or even want to record those occurances.
Except for a few moments here and there, director Brandon Christensen is meticulously careful not to break the realism presented in his film Bodycam. Police officers Jaime M. Callica as Officer Jackson and Sean Rogerson as Officer Bryce have no idea the literal hell that is unleashed when they respond to what they think is a routine domestic dispute.
Things immediately spiral out of control and just when you think they cannot get any worse, they do throughout the 75 minute running time. The star of the film is the setting, the forgotten and neglected neighbourhood the officers find themselves trapped in by supernatural forces. It is like something out of a Clive Barker novel or reminiscent of the community surrounding that church in Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Creepy homeless people, drug addicts shuffle along mumbling the same strange phrases with faraway looks in their eyes while Jackson’s mom, portrayed as some sort of inner city shaman or mystic, warns him and Bryce that things have changed since Jackson moved away and they are dealing with a very grumpy and evil force that has taken up residence there perhaps drawn by the hopelessness and squalor, we aren’t really sure.
Although at times there is a little bit too much of the shaky camera work that found footage films are famous for, Bodycam is one very freaky and very chilling ride long even though the ending gets away from Christensen like a perp who has slipped out of their handcuffs.
Watch: Shudder
What I will ALSO state a million times is that I really appreciate the kind of film production, film distributor A24 is. They are willing to take risks on quirky films that other studios shy or even run away from. Sometimes they hit a home run and sometimes they strike out. Undertone at least goes down swinging.
Undertone would have worked better as an audio story or audio book as its concept just doesn’t translate to film very well. For 94 minutes we watch one podcaster (Nina Kiri as Evy) and listen to another (Adam DiMarco as Justin) record their show while investigating a series of recordings sent in by a listener. The audio files are of a couple being haunted by a supernatural force of some sort over time. And that is the entirety of the film except for the big climax and a few scenes of Evy wigging out and looking after her ailing mother during breaks in recording.
Film is a visual and an audio medium, both work together to draw us into a story. With only the audio being highlighted here, the visual element suffers greatly because there is nothing more boring in a theater than watching a contained or single-location film and the dialogue just isn’t strong enough to carry the experience or maintain interest.
Undertone is an interesting idea but film is the wrong medium for it.
Watch: Theatres
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