The Bay
Finally toward the end of it all, Scary Movie Month earns its name. I've watched good, bad, fun, silly, smart, and stupid movies this month, but this was the first that was legitimately, deeply scary. It's found footage (one of the reasons I avoided it until now) but the gimmick works much better here than in most found footage movies, and since the footage comes from multiple sources (news footage, surveillance cams, Skype, vlogs, etc.) the majority of it is not the nausea-inducing shaky-cam that plagues so many found footage movies.
There's something in the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay, something deadly. Thousands of dead fish have floated to the surface, and now people are getting sick and dying, quickly and messily. The story is being told by a survivor, along with the conceit that a Julian Assange-type has uncovered and assembled the footage we're seeing to show what really happened despite governmental cover-ups.
Everything is very immediate thanks to it being found footage, which manages to increase the horror of the situation. As we see doctors and the CDC scurrying around trying to figure out what's going on, the sense of impending doom is palpable and legitimately frightening, not dissimilar to Soderbergh's Contagion only much scarier. The ending is a bit abrupt, but the movie is tremendously fast-paced and the scares build throughout. There are even a few solid jump scares on top of the terror that's already building, so there's something for horror fans of all tastes.
The environmental message is of course a bit heavy-handed, but the movie never comes across as preachy. I imagine if, say, Richard Donner had directed it it could've drowned in its obvious politics, but the focus here is on scaring the shit out of you, which it does extremely well. I don't scare easy (at least not when it comes to movies), but this is the real deal. Terrifying.
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