The Bay (2012)

Needless to say we have had our fair share of bad 'found footage' horror films and I'm not a big fan of these but 'The Bay' is a fresh out look at it. I find that it always keeps a hint of mystery about it throughout the film.

The characters play their parts well despite them just being segments. You never loose touch on reality with the way the footage is put together and with the narration throughout you don't get mixed up, and its oddly thought provoking for a low budget movie, also the special effects are small but work well.

Barry Levinson has done well to bring a beat up genre back and show what can be done with it.

Fmovies: A small town on the coast of Maryland has a bizarre outbreak of some kind in the middle of their 4th of July festivities. The symptoms are strange, disgusting, and quickly don't add up. The hospital can't figure out what it is. Within 24 hours the town is in chaos, surrounded by the national guard, and quarantined. A small town novice reporter was on scene covering the 4th of July and she describes what happened with the help of her own camera footage as well as other digital evidence pieced together from a variety of sources.

It has some of that Blair Witch camera work which I normally despise, but for this documentary style flick it worked really well and I think this is the best example of its genre I've seen.

The thing about this is that once we come to understand the origin of this outbreak it sounds like something that really could happen. The chain of events that cascaded into this disaster was surprisingly complex and at the same time very on point with the risks industrialization poses to the environment and to us! I don't think I've seen a threat in a horror movie this well thought out in many years. It all made sense once you understood what was happening but it definitely comes out of a blind spot in the horror realm.

This is not simply a mutated flesh eating infection, a curse, or anything quite so simple but neither does it have the histrionic level drama that some horror junkies need these days. This is weird horror in the realm of the real.

I never thought I'd say this, but I was glad when I found little discrepancies in the portrayal of the collapse of the infrastructure, hospital and police procedures, etc. While watching it, my mind was going into overdrive trying to find reasons that 'this isn't real; this really couldn't happen like this.' There were a couple of scenes that were chilling in how similar they were to actual news stories. I felt an emotional outpouring of sympathy for the victims. It was like watching one of these catastrophes like hurricane Katrina or hurricane Sandy where you just feel so bad for the people involved. Of course the difference was this was a bit more bloody and once you come to understand the nature of the biological danger it goes to a whole new level of revulsion.

I kind of wanted to see holes in it to find some respite from the growing anxiety. I felt like some of those holes were there in a couple of gratuitous shock value scenes that fell a little flat, and in the response from the government. But when you look at the lack of response hurricane Katrina got in the first 24 hoursÂ…maybe one of those holes isn't so big after all, though the conspiracy-style cover-up in the movie was a bit much.

All in all, this film will make your skin crawl!

I realized tonight that there's a built in problem with mockumentary and found footage films. Whereas regular films create their own subtly pliable reality where disbelief can be stretched and molded as long as it's kept in context; mockumentary and found footage films ask us to believe that this is *our* reality - not a created one where things might work just a little bit differently.

So let's say you're watching an regular horror movie and something happens that doesn't quite gel with our real world - let's say a cop goes up to a house, leaving his partner in the car, gunshots are heard in the house and the cop says "I'm going in" but the partner, instead of calling for backup and then going in with him - as would be standard common sense, let alone protocol - sits in the car and waits and waits instead...

In a regular film you might be able to let that go.

But in a film that's entire style and purpose is an attempt to make you believe it's real - errors like this take on a much greater importance. In fact, they're absolutely inexcusable, and that's why The Bay sucks.

It's a shame too, because the actual found-footage and documentary style is directed well, with a lot of care and attention paid to realism. I'd go as far as to say this was the best handled "reality" film footage I've seen to date.

Why then, would Barry Levinson settle on such a stupid script? The entire thing is riddled with bizarre errors, things that just wouldn't happen in our real world (the world the film asks us to place the context in). Things like the CDC being a NASA style call center where the five guys who take the calls are also the disease detectives, biological experts, and seemingly also authorized to make national security decisions. Or that the death of 700+ people in a single day in a town of thousands could be silenced with a simple financial payoff, or even smaller things like a high powered lawyer not checking her cellphone for 8 hours.

So ultimately, very well acted, very well directed but completely derailed by a script that's dumber than a box of rocks.

The Bay fmovies. First, I have to react to all the reviews that say that this film is so medically wrong that they can't take it seriously. I just have to say that they don't know how wrong they are. I work in the ER of the largest hospital in Europe and had to cope with H1N1 flu outbreak as a "reference center" and you can't imagine how f... up the organization (at every level, from our equivalent of CDC to the hospital administrative board) is. Had H1N1 virus been the "bad guy" of this film, we'd all be minus our tongue by now. (and don't get me started on "they should use a cure, why don't they do this or that"...).

Apart from that, this is really a great film for someone who loves his scares with a brain. Of course, if you prefer stories about a bunch of teen ages who just decided to go to the woods where an serial killer offed a few people 10 years ago just for kicks, you'll get bored out of your mind by the first half hour. But if you enjoy films which don't take you by the hand from point A to point B, don't overexpose their villain, and scare you on a deep level (the one you only can reach when you KNOW these things could happen), you'll love every minute of this film.

So don't go and see it if 1)you want to see heads explode 2)you want to see some cleavage 3)you want instant action from the moment the lights go out

Go and see it if 1)you like films that are rooted in the real world 2)you like intelligent films ("Alien" is a very intelligent film) 3)you can stomach truly gross scenes

Whether you like "found footage" or not is inconsequential, this is one of the best use of the genre I've watched (better than Cloverfield, as good as Rec, wasn't very fond of Diary of the Dead).

I liked it. Most horror movies depend on something supernatural and implausible to get their chills, but this one makes only modest science-fiction leaps from real ecological problems facing Chesapeake Bay to something truly creepy. Sure, its innocents-at-risk central subplot is hokey, but what do you expect from a horror movie? (We all need someone to identify with.) I think its use of the found-footage technique, by which it pretends to be a documentary, increases both its plausibility and its scariness. I can't judge how well or how fairly it publicizes the ecological problems facing Chesapeake Bay, but it makes for a zinger of a horror movie.

I'm not a huge fan of "found footage" films, but I liked this one.

BUT not every horror/thriller fan will like this film, so if your cup of tea is more of a shock and awe or an adrenaline pumping, blood gushing, gore spewing kind; you maaaaay want to skip this one.

What IS this movie? I'm not going to go into the storyline detailing, since a lot of reviews are already doing that. Instead, I'll tell you what kind of movie it is, in my own amateurish opinion.

This movie will appeal to the type of audience who likes to try new spins of old concepts. The movie does not have a lot of action, and it only has a bit of blood and gore, but it has its own charm. In the sense that it makes you think about possibilities, in general.

Granted, I thought it missed a lot of opportunities for scares, it still came out good and a convincing sample of FF. Maybe they didn't want to go for the "cheap scares" approach, which I have to admire them for, but the story did lack some substance. Still, I enjoyed it and would recommend it to friends.