THE STORY – Two police officers investigate a domestic dispute, and there is an accidental shooting. Not wanting to be crucified by the public, the officers attempt to cover it up – only to uncover that the cameras aren’t the only things watching them.
THE CAST – Jaime M. Callica, Sean Rogerson, Catherine Lough Haggquist & Angel Prater
THE TEAM – Brandon Christensen (Director/Writer) & Ryan Christensen (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 75 Minutes
God bless “The Blair Witch Project.” The grandparent of all found footage movies (with respect to the earlier but less successful “Cannibal Holocaust”), it gave way to a parade of imitators that continues to this day. However, none have ever topped it in terms of effectiveness and frightfulness. Director Brandon Christensen’s “Bodycam” clearly owes a debt to the 1999 classic, with some sequences and shots directly evoking that witchy cinematic phenomenon. As the title suggests, it eschews the typical handheld style of found footage, instead purporting to be derived from video captured by the bodycams of two police officers. Unfortunately, this proves to be the film’s biggest and boldest differentiation from other films of its ilk, eventually devolving into cheap scares supported by hackneyed screenwriting.
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t waste a second of its 75-minute runtime; it immediately jumps into action. Within the first five minutes, the two central figures – Officer Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Officer Bryce (Sean Rogerson) – find themselves dealing with a domestic disturbance that’s far from typical. They pull up to a house in a neighborhood with a bad reputation and hear screams coming from inside, giving them a reason to burst in. They find the house to be in a frighteningly poor state and decide to pull a classic Scooby-Doo, splitting up to investigate both the basement and the upper story. Upstairs, Jackson encounters a disturbingly bizarre nursery and a distressed-looking woman. And downstairs, Bryce discovers a deep, ominous hole in the concrete floor before he’s approached by a man carrying a bundle, who appears to be under a trance. After the man ignores Bryce’s demands that he stop moving, Bryce shoots him dead. This proves to be just the beginning of a true waking nightmare for the two officers.
“Bodycam” starts where most found-footage movies end: with an explosive set piece inside a spooky house. From there, it never lets up, taking the audience on the cinematic equivalent of a non-stop haunted attraction. This energy is appreciated, although the scares are decidedly repetitive and not very original. In fact, the way that the film uses homeless people and drug addicts as the source of many of its frights borders on distasteful, feeling more like an element found in a throwback exploitation film than a slick modern horror movie. Cliches abound not just in the way that these nameless characters are depicted, but also in the dialogue the two main cops recite. One scene later in the film, Jackson speaks directly to the camera, clearly drawing on Heather’s legendary confessional scene in “The Blair Witch Project.” But whereas that iconic moment has a hard-to-fake air of true desperation and genuine peril, Callica struggles to sell the imitative dialogue written for this scene, making a sequence that should be truly harrowing feel phony.
Admittedly, some of the jump scares work just fine, although the details of their construction are hardly new. The locations also give the film a much-needed sense of doom, with the desolate environments feeling oppressive and inescapable. One later sequence involving a house that literally feels haunted and terrifyingly inevitable is undeniably effective, making viewers feel as trapped in the cursed situation as Jackson is. It uses easy-to-understand (but never overly explained) supernatural logic to show that not only is Jackson damned, but the forces behind his torment are executing their wicked plan with glee, making the whole thing even scarier.
One thing that “Bodycam” gets right that so many found footage films don’t is the manner in which it sticks to its own rules. With a film like this that purports to be real, any filmmaking tricks or shortcuts deployed threaten to upend the entire cinematic concept, no matter how effectively it may be put together. Christensen never falls victim to such directorial traps. His film eschews non-diegetic music and sound; the characters also hear all noises the audience hears. Similarly, the only footage shown appears to come from sources that the police could gather as evidence, namely the cops’ bodycams and dashcams. Unfortunately, some CGI effects later in the film are distracting, as is the hard-to-understand sound mix of the demonic voices emanating from the possessed.
“Bodycam” is an efficient little scary movie that has its share of scares, even if they’re nothing that horror fans haven’t seen before. While the screenplay lets its actors down, with a runtime of barely over an hour, it’s hard to consider it a waste of time for all involved, least of all the audience. There’s something to be appreciated about a horror movie that doesn’t idle, packing action and propulsion into every minute, as “Bodycam” undeniably does.
