Movie Title: Evidence
Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Date Released: July 19th, 2013
Date Seen: June 21st, 2014
Part 1 – Spoiler Free Quickie Review
An interesting little horror movie that has a nice change to the “found-footage” genre, but it still fails in the end. The plot is predictable and it’s clear who is doing it, but I still enjoyed it. We follow the detectives going through some found footage of a brutal murder scene, looking for evidence to lead them to a killer. Then of course, we see the found footage. Because of this it feels like two different movies squished into one. It works well and I found it a welcome change from plain found footage films. But as I said, if you pay attention it’s pretty clear who the killer is which leads you to having no real sense of urgency or dread for the characters. They also sometimes show you the results of a death long before it happens, so you don’t even get worried when a character makes some dumb decision.
The acting from the found footage people was as to be expected. Cheesy, over done, but not horrible to watch. The acting from the detectives was alright. I did find the female detective annoying. It was more of the writing of her character though, as opposed to the acting. The other thing about this movie that I hated was the ridiculous CSI-like techniques, particularly on images. They would zoom in about 100x beyond the possible resolution of the picture or video and manage to get a crisp clean image. I hate techniques like that and find them lazy.
Overall, the deaths are pretty decent, just ridiculous enough to be amusing, and it’s a nice background watch. Not a complete waste of time, but not one I would ever seek out to watch again or go out of my way to watch. Even this review I’m half-assing while watching the USA vs Germany World Cup game, it’s just that much of a “meh” background movie.
Part 2 – Spoilery Stuff
So, if are watching the movie as it happens, not knowing who the killer is, a number of decisions made by characters are SUPER dumb. Even knowing that the two girls were framing it all, their decisions are still SO DUMB. I guess if you’re trying to make it look like an actual horror movie, some of the dumb decisions make sense (like the director girl going with the bus driver). But, one of the dumb decisions is what gave away who the killer was for me. So, that was annoying. Anyway, here are the things I thought were dumb or annoying.
For wanting to be a director, Rachel is pretty oblivious to certain things. “No, we haven’t passed anything for miles!” when literally a mile away they passed a ton of buildings that even I saw. Considering I was watching the movie at that point from her POV, come on. She’s also an annoying idiot. “I volunteer to go with you down to the abandoned bus when there’s a killer out there!” Then she whines and is loud THE WHOLE TIME. Don’t volunteer if you can’t handle yourself chicka chicka. Especially if you are the killer anyway. Try to come off not like a whiney little bitch. But, most everyone in the movie is dumb and makes these ridiculously dumb decisions. Like screaming “who is out there?!” when all your friends are in the room. Well sweetie, if all your friends are in the room, by process of elimination, WHO MUST BE OUT THERE? The killer. Idiot. The dumbest decision was the one that gave the movie away for me. When Leanna and Tyler go looking for Rachel. They knew her and Ben were going to the bus. There was no point in them leaving the saftey of that room unless one of them was the killer. The whole scorned boyfriend thing was too obvious, so it had to be Rachel.
I’m not sure why Vicki wouldn’t tell the girls on the bus what the sons present was, saying “it’s personal”. She’s told them a lot about herself already so seems random. After the crash Vicki whips it out pretty quickly offering it up to be used, so not sure why it was so “personal.”
Also, as I said up above, Detective Burquez is an idiot. Using the ridiculous zoom and sharpen technique again, they find out that the killer had on a welding mask. She immediately says oh then it HAS to be the old man with PTSD because he used to be a machinist. She wants his face out every where and to “find him”. She tells Detective Reese that she’ll stop if he finds irrefutable evidence against (for?) the old man. Lady, you’re already putting out an APB on him and you have NO evidence against him…. maybe YOU’RE the one jumping at things.
I like how Reese just goes straight to Steven’s mouth, pulling out the memory card with no gloves on at all. Then he goes straight from bloody memory card, to wiping it (and his hands) off and shoving it right into the computer. Ridiculous CSI tricks again? Perhaps.
Overall: 5/10
Some amusing deaths, nice change to the found footage genre, but a very predictable plot and some really dumb characters.
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