The Bay
This is a movie with a message, and that message is "This movie fucking sucks." If you've seen the trailers, you've witnessed a lie. The trailers are cut in such a fashion that you'd think this is a suspenseful ecological horror film about people being infested with parasites which eat them from the inside, driving them crazy and turning them into killers. Lie. This happens exactly once in the film, and you can see it coming a mile away. What happens for the rest of the film is a whole lot of nothing. It's like Jaws, if the Chief Brody character didn't exist and Mayor Vaughn was a lead character. And the shark was a bunch of parasites that look like roly-polies. This movie scrapes the very bottom of the "found footage" horror movie bucket. Terrible acting, with a "lead" actress who narrates the movie like this:
"This is Tom. He's a fisherman. He died around 9:30."
and then five minutes later you see Tom die. She does this numerous times, destroying what little suspense the movie might have had. We started laughing around the third time she did this.
Barry Levinson directed this, apparently while in the midst of a stroke. There are shots in the film which are obviously the work of professional cameramen interspersed with "amateur" handheld footage, and the end result is pretty jarring. A lot of times, whenever there's about to be something really gruesome, the footage is conveniently "corrupted" or the death takes place off-camera, so it doesn't even have that going for it. They also layer a soundtrack over it, complete with stinger cues for shock moments. The "message" is so goddamned ham-fisted I thought my eyes were infested with some kind of rolling parasite. It's one of those movies where you know what caused everything ahead of time, so the whole movie is you watching people scramble around trying to figure out what you already knew. Stop trying to teach me a lesson, Hollywood. You are really, really fucking bad at it.
