John Erick Dowdle

(On Cable TV, June 2021) If there’s a movie subgenre that I specifically hate, it’s those grainy found-footage horror films featuring an omnipotent serial killer. (It’s a surprisingly robust subgenre, as any idiot filmmaker with a camera, a knife and red syrup can try it.) I find those films pointless and repulsive on several levels. As a result, you can imagine that I was really not looking forward to The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a rather prominent title in modern horror. Part of the film’s infamy is that it took a surprisingly long time for the film to be available for public viewing. An early film from writer/director John Erick Dowdle (who ended up with a short but interesting horror filmography), it was briefly screened at a festival in 2007, was scheduled for theatrical release in 2008 but ended up yanked at the last moment, was briefly made available as video-on-demand in 2014 but had to wait until 2017 for release on home video. The ten-year window of unavailability is the kind of thing that really fuels cult interest in a film widely described as extreme horror, so it was inevitable that I’d steel myself for the results and have a peek. After seeing the film, I have good and bad news to report, although the mixed reaction is a good review in itself. At its best (which is to say its first and last 15 minutes or so), The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a surprisingly unnerving mockumentary detailing the actions of a supremely competent serial killer who left behind hundreds of tapes detailing his violent torture and murders without revealing his identity. The way Dowdle grounds his horror in reality is clever enough, with talking heads discussing serial killers, and gradually revealing the horror of the film’s specific villain. The shot in which the very long lineup of tapes is revealed is really good… but rather wasted in-context. The ending is as expected (with the killer still running free, albeit after a particularly audacious frame-up), but the film’s meta-narrative in referring to itself as an instrument for the killer is not bad. (Hilariously, one of the talking heads predicts that the killer will see the film repeatedly once it shows up in theatres and that the police will be paying attention — for a film that ended up with only a handful of theatrical showings!)  What’s in between those strong introductions and conclusions is not quite as good, with the credibility of the mockumentary being harmed by sensationalist “found footage” obviously manipulated, and talking heads that speak of the killer in dramatic, even admiring terms stopping just short of “…and he sounds really handsome!”  (There’s a good bit where the FBI profiler reads from contradictory profiles of the killer, the final one being “…he may be an FBI profiler.”) This misogynistic semi-glorification of the psychopath is what bothers me about the subgenre and specifically about this film (why should we be gawking at the near-omniscient cleverness of a serial killer?), although it has just enough substance to otherwise keep me engaged: This aside, Dowdle’s imperfect control over his material in the film’s middle section is vexing, considering the better start and ending. The basic problems with the subgenre are muted but not eliminated: it’s still a film that takes far too much delight in presenting violence in lavish voyeuristic detail, proposes a preposterously genius-level villain and features far too many sequences of actresses sobbing and screaming. Still, the fact that I haven’t dismissed The Poughkeepsie Tapes out of hand is a strong indicator that it’s one of the best examples of its kind, as damnable as it may be. I’m not a fan, but there’s an audience for this and you can see how many of the film’s elements could be recycled into something superior.

(In French, On TV, August 2019) I’m usually able to give mixed reviews even to terrible movies — If the premise doesn’t work, maybe I’ll praise a few good moments, or stop to talk about the performances, or discuss elements of the plot that were promising. But with As Above So Below, I fear we’ve reached a perfect trifecta of failure. The premise is dull, the cinematography is terrible, the characters are unlikable and the rest of the film is unremarkable except when it’s trying its best to exasperate its audience. Somehow, we’re meant to be interested in an expedition that goes deep in the Paris catacombs to find a magical device of some sort. Except that they keep going deeper and deeper into hell (or whatever), encountering mysterious things and being killed along the way. This already-uninteresting premise is made worse by its execution as a found-footage film (despite some of the footage being quite obviously inaccessible) with the camera constantly jerking around. But writer-director John Erick Dowdle then makes things even worse, because even the characters are terrible people upon whom the worse fates are actively wished for. The protagonist spouts some incomprehensible mystical jargon in between self-flattering moments that only made us dislike her more. (Tellingly, she describes herself seriously as a PhD “symbologist,” something not found outside Dan Brown novels.)  I rarely complain about horror movies in which the main characters survive, but I’ll make an exception in this case: I was really disappointed when three of them made it out alive of the catacombs in what may be the film’s only halfway-effective visual. The scares are dull, the claustrophobia not nearly as effective as The Descent, and whatever weirdness the film throws on-screen quickly makes the film jump into “anything can happen, whatever I don’t care” territory. Sometimes, you have to take some time away from a genre to appreciate its most average entries, but as it turns out I don’t miss found-footage movies in the slightest and the past five years haven’t done As Above So Below any favours.