The Taking of Deborah Logan

The following review was not written by me, although I agree with it 100%. I just don't get the hype around this flick.  I was too lazy to craft a review for it myself, so I found someone else to do it, because I'm a horrible person. The author wishes to remain anonymous. Let's call him Buck Naked. Because we can. And no, he is not a porno actor.

To this review I will add my unasked for opinion, which is that this movie was only made because of Jill Larson's creepy-ass cameo in Shutter Island.

 

Another Pretentious Found Footage Flick

a justified rant by Buck Naked

The Taking of Deborah Logan is a horror movie bloated with potential greatness.  It has a talented cast that includes the great Anne Ramsey and it tells a story about something that has, in one way or another, touched the lives of most of us, maybe all of us: Alzheimer’s disease.  A documentary crew moves in with Deborah Logan, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, to chronicle her descent into the disease, which gradually erases people in the most horrible way imaginable.  But we soon discover that Deborah’s problem is not only medical, but supernatural.  I wanted to so much to love this movie.  I wanted so much to finish this movie.  But I could not.

Instead of giving us what could have been a powerful experience, director, co-writer, co-executive producer, and co-editor Adam Robitel chose to make The Taking of Deborah Logan as a found footage movie.  A movie that had all the ingredients necessary to blow us away is yet another notch in the belt of this trendy and far from beloved (except, bafflingly, by filmmakers) movie style, which was dead immediately after The Blair Witch Project was released.

The Blair Witch Project worked because the style was fresh, original, and unexpected.  It did not signal the beginning of a new wave in horror movies.  It was a little movie that tried something different, pulled it off, and found great success.  Now it seems that half the horror movies being made are found footage.  Have we seen a wave of found-footage romantic comedies?  Found-footage action movies?  Found-footage superhero movies?  No, we have not.  But the horror genre has been buried under them. And it is being smothered to death.

 The Taking of Deborah Logan is a beautiful example of the damage found footage is doing to the genre.  I admired so much about the movie, but I don’t happen to enjoy watching movies with spastic camera work.  In fact, I won’t.  I am insulted that I am expected to sit through that kind of amateurish, distracting, sometimes nauseating shooting style and become emotionally involved in whatever story it is being used to tell.  A story that could have been gut-wrenchingly emotional as well as terrifying was lost in the jittery camera work, the unintelligible dialogue that required subtitles, the jarring editing, the overall sloppiness that is the hallmark of found-footage movies.

The found-footage style detaches the audience from emotional involvement.  Watching a movie about a video of people is not nearly as interesting as watching a movie about people.  Found footage is the unnecessary and harmful middleman in a baffling equation.  Why is it there?  Just show us the story.  Involve us in the story.  Don’t add another layer of distance from the emotional content of the movie.

The Taking of Deborah Logan would have been a much richer, more moving, and more terrifying experience had we been involved in that story, had we been inserted into the situation as an unseen observer.  You know, like in a movie!  It still could have involved the documentary crew shooting their movie, but instead of being confined to the crew’s cameras, we would have been emotionally involved with the characters.  It could have achieved the kind of greatness we don’t see in horror movies anymore.  But that potential was ripped out of the movie with the decision to shoot it as found footage.  That was a stupid decision that I cannot understand.

 It is no longer clever.  It is no longer original.  It has not been either of those things for about 16 years.  (The Blair Witch Project was made in 1999, for you math buffs.)  Found footage is perhaps the worst thing that’s ever happened to horror movies, the only genre in which you find them.  Every time one is made, it’s another knife stabbed into the back of the genre, which relies on some kind of emotional involvement to work.  Distancing the audience from that emotional involvement is like cutting all the songs out of musicals.

It’s time to stop supporting these movies and the misguided people who continue to make them, even though the vast majority of horror movie fans I have talked to are sick of them.  You can still be a diehard horror movie fan even if you don’t see every single horror movie made.  Start avoiding these non-movies.  See something else.  Do something else.  Found footage is gutting the genre on the screen, and there is no better proof of that than the profoundly great horror movie that The Taking of Deborah Logan could have been.