Jeruzalem (2015)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) A surprising number of horror films have to do with Americans travelling abroad and getting caught up in terrifying events. It would be tempting to call the entire subgenre intensely xenophobic, but Jeruzalem does have the distinction of being an Israeli production. Oh well — it’s not as if the film doesn’t have other distinctions. The first, occasionally groan-worthy, has much of the main plot of the film being filmed POV-style from a pair of smart glasses, which also provides opportunities for filling some of the backstory. The other, intermittently more interesting is that writers-directors Doron Paz and Yoav Paz take advantage of using Jerusalem as the backdrop to have a zombie(ish) invasion tied to the end of times — by the time the film ends, it goes really big. The result is not that good, but it avoids many of the problems in the overexposed found-footage/zombie genres. Anyone expecting a straight zombie film may be disappointed, though — there are a lot of biblical references in Jeruzalem, and a slow buildup to the action. There is a slow start and a bit of a lull in the third quarter, but the originality of the location and the more ambitious scale of the film do keep it distinctive.