In spite of feeling like crap, I'm still going to review crappy movies! This is Project Terrible- Round 8! We started with
Shaolin Dolemite and
Creepshow 3, so I need to keep the theme going. Today's film is
Area 407. Where do I begin? One- low-budget, DTV film. Two- Found Footage Film. Three- badly-written characters that grate on your nerves. I could probably stop there, but I will push on. The film is about a bunch of kind of annoying characters that meander around from some sort of threat. That's the film in a nutshell- awkward running from an unseen monster. That said, they do show you the monster...at the very end of the movie. It's so goofy that it's almost worth the wait. I mean, it's not, but you get the idea. This film is a rough one, but I'm still glad that I watched it instead of
Bong of the Dead. I'll get the film soon enough, but let's enjoy this 'reprieve.' To find out just how silly and bad this film is, read on...
The film's worst part comes right in the beginning. I'm looking at you, annoying girl that will never shut up!
On the plus side, you haven't replaced Sarah Lieving from
Monster/Tokyo. It was a narrow race though.
The first fifteen minutes of the film can be summed up like this:
- Annoying Girl talks to everyone.
- Everyone pretends not to hate her.
- Annoying girl pretends that personal space doesn't exist.
- Rinse & Repeat.
Finally, the exposition diarrhea ends with the plane crash. If you're expecting any F/X shots here, you'd be mistaken. Instead of the monotony, here's this Meme-in-Progress.
After the crash, our main camera person becomes the previously-quiet Sister. Oh and plane crashes cause big flesh wounds that otherwise don't effect you. Want to test that, Jamie and Adam?
Kudos to the Sister for shoving the camera in her wounded sibling's face and not caring for her wounds.
Yeah, the conceits of this annoying Sub-Genre kind of make the plots seem silly at times. Yes, I do hate it.
Over thirty minutes in and the creature finally shows up. By 'shows up,' of course, I mean that it doesn't really appear and does shit off-camera.
Fun note: our heroine films the woman holding on for dear life...instead of helping her. You're a real bitch, you know that?!?
The next twenty-odd minutes involves the group wandering around aimlessly, being scared by random noises and being confused. Here's a visual summary.
The story gets a little wonky as one guy got bit earlier and spits up...eggs, apparently. If you want an explanation for this, watch a good movie.
If you don't want to know how this movie ends, skip the last caption. SPOILERS Ahoy!
*
*
*
*
*
*
This happens. The End.
*
So yeah, this sucked. I don't care for purely Found Footage films. The one exception I make is for the original film-
Cannibal Holocaust. No, I won't let this go. The film fails for many, many reasons. The Acting- sub-par at best. At worst, it's the young girl who's doing all of the talking in the opening. As a bonus, characters just change randomly. One guy- easily known as Drunk Asshole- acts like a dick for 98% of the movie. It's solidified when he runs off without our heroines- since one of them is hurt and walking slowly. A minute later, he suddenly comes back and acts nice. Consistency is nice- I'm just saying! The Writing is bad, but that's kind of a mixed complaint. According to IMDB, a lot of the Dialogue was ad-libbed by the Actors. Yeah, that worked out great for
The Blair Witch Project, right? The Story- not counting the Dialogue- is stupid and full of unexplained events. What was the point of the experiments in Area 407? What caused the plane to crash? Where did the front half of the plane go? Where did everyone in the front half of the plane go? I could go on and on here. For a plot so minor and void, there are a lot of issues. If you like cheap, DTV films, you may get some perverse joy out of this. It's by no means comparable to stuff like
OREC or Chronicle, two films that I'm not the biggest fans of to begin with. This is just silly sometimes, but otherwise dull and annoying. Of course, there is an explanation that I just found...
Next up, Jim Wynorski. Do I really need to say any more? Stay tuned...
I was lucky (?) enough to get a pre-release screener of this almost four months before it came out. Here was my take at the time (you may have read it already): http://www.planetfury.com/content/area-407-2012
ReplyDeletePart of me wishes that I would get Screeners from film companies.
DeleteThe other part of me thinks about films like 'Area 407' and says 'Thank God I don't!'
I'm a lover of Found Footage films when they're done RIGHT, but this was a real stinker from end-to-end. It really bothered me that they spoiled the ending (ludicrous as it was) by putting the dinosaur in the trailer. It's a trend that is really beginning to drive me crazy.
ReplyDeleteMy review (if you're interested)
--J/Metro
Holy shit- they do!
DeleteThis just bring more to my theory that Found Footage films either try to SPOIL themselves on the cover- see 'Chronicle' and 'Quarantine'- or just pick random shit- see 'The Last Exorcism' and 'The Devil Inside.'
SPOILING the film in your own Trailer- that's something special!
For reals, a dinosaur? I'm actually torn between that being really clever or really stupid... Those eggs don't even look like dinosaur eggs. And why would getting bitten by a dinosaur make you puke up dinosaur eggs?
ReplyDeleteOkay, I've decided. It's really stupid.
Not just a Dinosaur. It's a not-to-scale Dinosaur.
ReplyDeleteIt could have been a Raptor. It's not. It's a Raptor-sized T-Rex.
Maybe the Government wanted to make the new T-Rex Nano. Makes more sense than anything else.
Oh and by asking the question about the Eggs, you have done more work than the Writers of the film. Where's your Credit?
I do like a good Found Footage movie. All evidence points to this not being one. Thank you for my 90 minutes.
ReplyDeleteI just still want to know why that one review I found said "But hey, at least it's Korean."
ReplyDelete