31 Days of Halloween: The Taking of Deborah Logan

2014, Adam Robitel (Escape Room) -- download

Found footage. Its now a standard horror trope, or more accurately, its now a very tired standard trope in horror movies. If your movie doesn't have a gimmick, you can always fall back on the FF. But we seem to like them. But even so, I still prefer the actual "found" footage, as opposed to just doing the fake documentary style, ala What We Do In the Shadows. At one point, I even said of this movie, "Found footage implies everyone died and they find the camera...."

Mia, Gavin and Luis are shooting a documentary on Alzheimer's Disease, and the subject of their film will be Deborah Logan (Jill Larson, All My Children). He daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsay, Mad About You) has arranged for it to happen, mainly for the promised money, and probably for a bit of human contact since she and her mom live alone, without anymore help in a somewhat isolated area. Deborah is a "proper old lady" and considering the aspects of her disease, she can be incredibly demanding of things being exactly as they should be. The idea of a documentary crew living in their house with them, filming for weeks as the disease progresses seems like a horror story of awkward encounters unto itself.

But of course, because of the sub-genre, things start being weird when the cameras capture not just strange behaviour, but downright eerie. The first thing they see is Deborah going from the kitchen floor to standing on the cabinets in a single "frame" -- she does not climb or use a chair, she just appears. Gavin the sound guy is creeped out.

The house they live in is large, old and mostly shut down. Rooms sit unused and there are many many storage spaces, eventually inspiring Luis's, "How many attics does this place have?!?" It made me wonder if this movie had some influence on the more recent dementia-as-supernatural-horror movie Relic. But in this one, the house is just eerie, not supernaturally influenced.

In one such attic sits the abandoned ancient phone switchboard system that mom used to run a business with. During one incredibly spooky encounter with the plot, they hear mom talking in an otherworldly voice, in French. Mom doesn't speak French. That leads to some research into her clients, where they learn of Evil Dr. Desjardins (pronounced day-har-deen for some confoundingly probably American reason) who had been caught performing weird rituals.

Eventually the movie ends up not being about what is captured on camera, but has to stick to the gimmick and they just chase Deborah and Sarah around with their cameras, even when she is hospitalized. Yeah, I am not sure any hospital would allow them to shoot inside, let alone mount ceiling cameras.

There is one cute scene where Gavin does the atypical horror movie reaction, and just packs up and leaves. He doesn't know what is going on, nor does he cares. He's just getting fuck out of Dodge.

There are some pretty decent scares, and while the whole supernatural "explanation" is muddy at best (but not as muddy as Relic was) it does provide some pretty fucking weird shit centered around snake focused rituals. I am sure unhinging your jaw like that must have hurt like a summabitch.

I hate when movies do things, solely for the sake of the gimmick, but have no point in being in the movie. The aforementioned hop-up-on-the-cabinets scene has no purpose. Sure, Evil Dr Bad French had possessed mom, but is he just fucking with the camera crew, or does standing on kitchen fixtures serve some purpose in his ancient rituals? 

But "not bad" is the mantra we say at the end of these movies, as we got a few scares out of it, and at least the acting from mom was pretty on point.