New streaming on Shudder!
Directed by Brandon Christensen.
Written by Brandon Christensen, Ryan Christensen.
Check out the trailer here!!
A pair of officers go on a routine wellness check that results in the accidental deaths of an incoherent man and a baby (the baby was incoherent as well but aren’t all babies?). Choosing to cover up the deaths instead of reporting them, the police officers find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar neighborhood with the residents acting in some kind of zombie-like manner. It seems at the heart of it all is a powerful entity that won’t let them get out of this maze of streets alive.
Are the actors successfully acting like they aren’t acting?
Across the board, this is a decently acted film. Both actors playing the police officers, Officer Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Officer Bryce (GRAVE ENCOUNTERS’ Sean Rogerson) spout the lingo and for the most part, seem like real cops. Now, the fact that Bryce leaps to a coverup so quickly feels a bit forced, as he didn’t know the guy he shot was holding a baby and the man was charging towards him at the time. So most likely, this is not one of those cases where the cop’s over-aggression is in question. Still, I get it that the coverup aspect is needed for the rest of the film to go down, so I’m willing to turn a blind eye to it and Rogerson and Callica sell it that this is a rash decision made in the middle of a chaotic situation.
Does the footage found seem authentic and untouched by additional production?
As the title says, mostly everything in this film comes from the officers’ bodycams. There is an edit back and forth between the body cameras on the two cops, but in an investigation, to make sense of what has been going on, it is understandable that the two cameras would be spliced together. There is a tagline at the beginning saying that edits were made to this footage. There is also no annoying musical intrusions. Everything we hear are sounds that are captured by the cam.
Why don’t they just drop the camera and get the hell out of there?
Well, the officers are ordered to wear these bodycams so they can’t just toss them away. There is an early attempt to tamper with the cameras, but once the underground tech gal hears what this is all about, she doesn’t want anything to do with it. For some reason, the cop puts the camera back on and continues to record, which may have been done out of habit, but still feels a bit of a reach to have him put the camera on again after he has implicated himself by discussing a coverup on camera. This is more of a plot hole in the movie than a reason for him to keep the camera running.
Is there an up-nose BLAIR WITCH confessional or a REC-drag away from the camera?
Yep, there are a couple of drag-aways and at least one, maybe two confessions. I don’t know why found footage films still do this. I guess, it shows that the filmmakers didn’t do their due diligence and actually watched some found footagers like the fans like us have for the last twenty years, to know how tired a cliché these scenes really are.
Does anything actually happen? Is the lead in too long and the payoff too short?
The pace is pretty constant and fast for most of this film. The two police officers are on the run pretty much from the get-go when they stop to do the wellness check on. The film tries to keep throwing things at the viewer to keep the interest there and it might work for some viewers, but…well, let me get to that after the next question.
Does the film add anything to the subgenre and is it worth watching?
After the credits began to roll, I immediately thought this film was originally intended to be a segment for a V/H/S anthology film. And with all honesty, I think that would have been a better place for this story. I was riveted to the screen for the first fifteen to twenty minutes, but after that, the story just kind of spins its wheels until the over-the-top ending. Sure, the action continues to be in your face and some of the jump scares work. But it seems like the film is trying to walk the tightrope between being sympathetic to cops (which is definitely not a popular opinion in film these days) and condemning them (which we see a whole lot more of). It also seems to want to say something about the forgotten neighborhoods where no one wants to help or protect the innocents who live there. Because of that, there is the theme of a community rising up and defending itself. These are powerful ideas that might have been interesting, but the film really loses steam when it tries to go into some kind of lore about cults, demons, and Lovecraftian monstrosities. Basically, what I’m saying is that a lot of padding was required to make BODYCAM into a full-length film and that was to this story’s detriment. This is one of those instances where the film looks and feels authentic, it just lacks strength in the story department. Still there is a heavily edited version of BODYCAM that would have made one hell of a V/H/S segment.
