Evidence

Evidence that guys with cameras will get
you killed.

Welcome to Tuesday at The Tagline! Today I'm going to talk about a movie I watched on the Netflix last week: Evidence. This continues my horror movie tear (I guess this is the time to do it right?) Evidence was an interesting film, shot on a very small budget and using the "found footage" approach to movie making that was first popularized in horror by The Blair Witch Project, a movie which bored my pants off with its boring woods scenes. As the name might indicate, the film itself is the 'found footage' shot by 4 friends filming a documentary in the deep woods, when things go wrong. Really wrong. The footage serves as evidence of the bizarre experiments that seemed to be conducted in the area. There were a lot of neat ideas on offer here, and certainly I was impressed by how far they managed to stretch their budget, but the movie had plenty that was wrong with it too, and I'm not going to gloss over it. Warning for everyone, I have to spoil some stuff to explain some of my criticism.

Just look at this stupid douche's douchey face.

Evidence starts with 4 friends, Brett, Ryan, and their girlfriends (?) Ashley and Abi setting out into the wilderness, under the pretense of shooting a documentary. It's never really made clear what the documentary is supposed to be about, but judging from what I saw, the focus seemed to be Ryan making his friend Brett look like an idiot in the woods, by showcasing how totally incompetent he was outside of civilization. Alternatively maybe Ryan watched Into the Wild one too many times, and were overwhelmed by the urge to die in the woods (oops spoilers!). The trip starts off in the typical way, with goofing off in the woods, getting drunk and drawing penises on Ashley's face, and oh yeah terrifying noises in the woods. At this point in the movie, I was feeling like this was a pretty typical found footage style movie. The next day you catch a glimpse of the 'thing' that seems to be stalking them, and that night shit gets... real. Brett disappears by morning, Ryan sets out to look for him, and then the situation rapidly deteriorates. I thought it was cool that whenever the 'creature' was nearby the camera would begin to freak out (it reminded me of Silent Hill) and that the camera seemed incapable of focusing on the creature. I recognize that this was probably to cover up the low budget effects, but I thought it was a classy way to do it.

She seems upset. Maybe she needs a monster hug. Boobs.

Once bodies and their insides start piling up all over the place, the movie takes a sudden turn. Ashley and Abi end up in what seems like a government facility, and now they're running from the monsters, but also guys with guns, who I wasn't sure if they were shooting the monsters or at the girls. Minutes later, there are also what seems like crazy test subjects, just shy of being literal zombies. Then some sort of weird nightmare room where there is a dead pregnant woman, giving birth to some gross blood monster. Apparently these monsters don't kill ladies, they mate with them? That's pretty weird.

Whoooaaaaaaaa. Duuuuuuuuuude. Whaaaaaat?

Where I'm going with this is that about half way through the movie, and especially towards the end, the movie seems to become a totally different movie. Then it skips through about 3 more movies at warp speed. While I will admit that the movie creeped the holy hell out of me in several parts, it just didn't seem like they really planned things out. While they did allude very very vaguely to the fact that the campers were straying into private property possibly, there just wasn't much of an indication in the front end of the movie that it was going to be a government experiment biohazard outbreak movie. Because they don't warn you in any way that it's going to happen, it feels cheap and disjointed when it does. You're still freaked out, but you're left asking "what the hell is going on?" I get that this is found footage, so it doesn't feel obligated to explain everything but there's a point where that ceases to be an excuse, and just becomes lazy, sloppy storytelling. I enjoyed watching Evidence, but if it had been better thought out, it could have been a really good movie. It just didn't know what it wanted to be.

That's it for today! Join me again on Thursday, when I will probably not review a movie that involves a girl getting her head shot off. Or maybe I will! : D