Tuesday, May 18, 2010

MEADOWOODS (a review)



A low budget camcorder-pov movie. If you hate that style (like BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or CLOVERFIELD) then avoid.

The story: three bored high school kids decide to murder a random female student to "shake things up," but when one of them begins to feel for the girl the group turns on itself and everything goes wrong.

Was is good? Almost. The story is simple enough and the camcorder-pov kind of works, giving it a bit of a verite it probably wouldn't have had. And it is the verite that helps the story because what is most chilling is the matter of factness of how these three kids set out to murder someone. There isn't they overhype sex/cool thing that BULLY had. This is much more low key and much more effective for it. Still, because of the filming style and the largely improv nature of the movie (at least I assume it's improv -- heaven help us it that was a written script!) there are lags and parts where it's more annoying than chilling. However, it's at the midpoint that things get interesting. They decide they want to interview the girl before killing her to find out what she is scared of so they can try to really freak her out. However, the boy interviewing her conncepts with her. The movie intercuts between the interview and the three of them planning the murder, but now we see the one conspirator having second thoughts. This make what would have been a much too straight forward movie come close to being possibly the next BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
However, it's in the third act that the movie falters. Movies like this need to build to a great ending. BLAIR WITCH PROJECT had a fantastic ending. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY had a great ending. This ending just doesn't work. If I were the filmmakers I'd pull a PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and come up with a few different endings and reshoot until they got one that really, really worked. With a great ending this could be a successful movie. Without it, it's not.

*** ALMOST RECOMMEND (for fans of BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY) ***

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