Grave Encounters

 

Grave Encounters (2011)

Dir. and written by "The Vicious Brothers"

Starring Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Juan Riedinger, Mackenzie Gray

 

The evidence is encouraging that the high-water mark of the found-footage wave is now safely behind us, or has at least receded enough to allow us to take stock of the damage it did when it was fully upon us. Though it never entirely went away after the huge success of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (not the first found footage film,* but unambiguously the genesis of the modern movement, even if it took a few years after its release to really catch fire), my sense is that the conceit make the leap from "gimmick" to "subgenre" somewhere around 2007/2008, which together logged 20 entries I can easily identify, including the first films of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, REC, and CLOVERFIELD series (by contrast, wikipedia lists only 26 prior found-footage film total, many of them vanishingly obscure). And it wasn't done growing; I count 19 films in 2013 and a peak 22 in 2014, after which things gradually slowed down without ever completely stopping (wikipedia lists 6 found footage films from 2021, and five so far this year).

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, our subject today, hails from the thick of it, a time when there was still some excitement about the idea that the format might be used to do new things, although I personally was already a little sick of the whole thing. I never bothered with it at the time, but even though the conceit has lost a little of its vigor in the last few years, it's been a part of every Chainsawnukah since I watched the original V/H/S in theaters during the first one, and one tinkers with tradition at a high spiritual cost. So what the hell, once more into the breach, dear friends.

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is a very stupid name that does not inspire much confidence, but I'm pleased to say it doesn't quite live up to the worthlessness the name implies. The premise is a simple one: a team of TV hucksters making one of those insipid "Ghost Hunters" type shows locks themselves in for a night in a supposedly haunted ex-asylum, only to find that getting out is not as simple as they might have assumed. Oh, and it's haunted.

 

The haunting part is the movie's weakest trait; while it's certainly more eventful than the ridiculously whammy-free PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (four years old by this point!) the events themselves are pretty basic haunted house hokum, occasionally good for a jump scare but mostly a bit threadbare (there's a person standing in the corner! Oh no, they turned around and have a scary face!) or just outright silly (there are... uh, a bunch of arms awkwardly reaching out of the ceiling? A lady disappears in a puff of smoke?). Can’t argue with the sturdy efficacy of a black-eyed, bloody-mouthed goon appearing suddenly on the ceiling and chasing you, but it’s not nearly enough return-on-investment to be worth sitting though eons of agonizing improvised circular arguments between the film’s green-faced non-characters. It’s also not something that takes any real advantage of the found-footage format, though by the year 2022 I’ve more or less given up any reasonable expectation that a found-footage film will use the format in any innovative ways.  

 

Fortunately, it turns out the “getting out is not as simple” part is rather more interesting than the hauntings. See, when you’re in a haunted asylum, the obvious thing to do is just to… leave. And in fact, that’s exactly what our gang tries to do. Only they find that they can’t. Every hallway just leads to more hallways. Every stairwell leads to more stairs. When they finally get to the atrium where they’re sure they entered, the door just leads to more hallways. At one point, we’re told they spent an entire day walking in one direction without getting anywhere. Or at least, one day according to their watches; somehow, the sun never comes up. Days pass. They sleep, they wake, they wander. They’re supposed to be let out the following morning, but morning never comes, and no one ever comes for them. That is kind of scary; the deep wrongness of the never-ending night, of the never-ending hallways, the feeling of being utterly trapped in a cage that has no exit, where basic rules of reality have dissolved until you lack any tools at all to fight back against your captors… that is horror on a very different level. Hell, since I already used the words No Exit, I might as well just say it: it’s existential horror. You can run from a scary ghost. You can’t run from reality itself. If true horror is, to a degree, about making you feel powerless, this is one of the most oppressive scenarios I can imagine, one wherein the rules have been rigged so that no amount of strength or speed or cleverness can save you.

 

It's a dark vibe, so it’s both a shame and maybe just as well the movie mostly tilts towards headier scares after a while; there’s only so much oppression you can take before things get more depressing than a movie this silly can handle. Still, there’s something here, and it gives the standard-issue BOO! moments a little more punch than they’d otherwise have, at least for a while. Still not enough to really make it worth enduring 95 minutes of annoying people shouting the same thing at each other endlessly in night-vision green (which does add to the oppressiveness of it all, but also to the monotony), and especially not to get to such a silly nothing of an ending. But I’ve seen worse, and was expecting less. When you’re expecting nothing and get a little, one tends to be grateful. Still, a film that’s making fun of Ghost Hunter type shows, even one which is at least moderately more eventful, would do well to remember that at least those shows are only, like, an hour long, and that includes commercials.

 

 

* That honor appears to go to Shirley Clarke's THE CONNECTION way back in 1961, with the first found footage horror film apparently CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST in 1980.

 

 

As Above So Below

As Above So Below (2014)

Dir John Erick Dowdle

Written by John Erick Dowdle, Drew Dowdle

Starring Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge, François Civil, Marion Lambert, Ali Marhyar

  

            Well, it’s Chainsawnukah, so tradition dictates that you gotta get some found-footage shit in there. For years this was merely a matter of statistical probability; if two out of every three new horror movies was found footage, you just had to accept that you'd end up with at least one by sheer chance, even if you were actively trying to avoid it. This year, though, I notice that they’re not nearly as pervasive; a new trend of mopey, uneventful indie “horror” movies about sad people seems to have emerged as the fashionable way for lazy hucksters to crank out content with minimal effort. But a tradition is a tradition, so a-hunting for found-footage clusterfucks of yesteryear I went. This fit the bill nicely in that it was A) found footage and B) that’s it. I did not have high hopes for AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, even going in with the interesting trivia that it was actually shot in the real Catacombs of Paris. Great, what better way to experience a jaw-dropping real-world marvel than through an indecipherable visual jumble of shaky cam with ad-libbed shouting over top? But I watched it anyway, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

            And it turned out that was a good idea, because right off the bat, it's way nuttier than I anticipated. We begin with the introduction of our hero, the excellently-named Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks, minor roles in both HAMLET and SPICE WORLD! Now that’s a resume!) who we encounter in medias res, already on an adventure considerably more epic than you would usually find in some found-footage debacle: she’s tomb-raiding a forgotten, sinister underground shrine in Iran as part of her quest to discover the secret of famed 14th-century alchemist Nicolas Flamel. And what she discovers in Iran (after effecting an exciting escape while the cavern collapses behind her!) sends her to Paris, to uncover a secret message transcribed on the back of Flamel’s tombstone! Woah, was not expecting this crazy ass Da Vinci Code shit.

In Paris, she meets up with her dishwater-dull ex-boyfriend, George (Ben Feldman, one of the guys who gets killed in opening 15-minute mini-movie in the FRIDAY THE 13th REMAKE) and cameraman Benji (Edwin Hodge, two PURGEs), and then get right down to the business of finding the treasure map hidden on the back of Nicolas Flamel’s tombstone or whatever. You might think this in itself would require, like, a heist or something, but nope; the tombstone is just hanging there in a museum, not guarded or even behind glass or anything. I thought this whole thing was delightfully silly until I looked it up and discovered that no, this is actually a real place (the Musée de Cluny, a Paris museum devoted to the Middle Ages), and that’s probably Flamel’s real tombstone being used as a prop. Take this movie out of the “horror” section, folks, it’s a documentary! Needless to say, they waste no time in translating the Aramaic writing of a 14th-century Frenchman’s tombstone poem, and holy shit, it rhymes in English! That’s thinkin’ ahead, Nicolas Flamel, you old dog! He also apparently calculated his conspiracy numbers in feet, which seems surprising. But I guess I can't argue with them, since they're looking at the real tombstone of a legendary magical weirdo. 

This turns out to be the movie’s secret weapon. Something about the mix of fantastical bullshit with actual reality that’s even crazier really does it for me. I guess it’s why I’m so embarrassingly helpless to resist the appeal of Ancient Aliens or a good conspiracy theory or whatever. Reality is nearly always going to be weirder and more interesting than whatever bullshit some goofball found-footage director is going to be able to imagine, and so the smartest thing a fiction writer can do, sometimes, is find some little nugget of real-world insanity and piggyback on top of that, drawing tenuous but irresistible links between the stranger corners of actual reality rather than inventing new, and almost certainly less outlandish, fiction from whole cloth. The good create; the best steal. I’m sorry, but it’s fucking awesome that Nicolas Flamel really did design his own mysterious, cryptic tombstone, and that you can actually go to some museum in Paris and see it! Throw some circuitous plot and outlandish theory over top of that, and I’m a happy man.

Here’s the problem, though: I’m way into this dumbass story, but the found footage makes it 1,000 times harder to buy, because all I can think is how unnatural and phony all the acting and photography and everything about this is. I can and will happily accept that there’s a 600-year old alchemical conspiracy to solve, but I cannot accept that human beings talk or act like this, and the found-footage conceit forces me to compare this behavior to mundane reality in a way that traditional cinematic staging doesn’t. If you’re going to start throwing around the name “Nicolas Flamel” why on Earth would you ever intentionally do anything to remind the audience of what normal reality is like?

Still, as luck would have it, the tombstone sends our Da Vinci Treasure-hunters down into the endless, ancient catacombs below Paris, and of course, they actually shot there for real! Apparently this is the first film production ever to do so! And once there, the obvious objective reality of the catacombs themselves takes you a long way. Plus, our party is joined by irreverent, punk rock Parisians Papillion (François Civil, FRANK), Souxie (Marion Lambert, MONGEVILLE) and Zed (Ali Marhyar, ZERO DARK THIRTY), who agree to guide them through the dangerous maze, and have an easy, practical naturalism to them that the Americans do not. In fact, I wondered if they too were “real” – actual catacomb guides essentially playing themselves on screen. Doesn’t seem like it, but at least they inhabit their roles much more naturally than the Americans do, and contribute a real lived-in feel which grounds the film immensely. Papillion’s straightforward, pragmatic guide to how to crawl across ancient human bones without hurting your arms smacks of lived experience, and the actor delivers it with the right mix of very sensible advice and very slight smugness about his greater experience. He seems confident and reasonable and in control, in a very grounded way.

That makes it all the more potent when he suddenly doesn’t seem to be in control any more, when the skills he’s mastered betray him. Because wouldn’t you know it, before long our heroes end up hopelessly lost, and begin to suspect that something supernatural and sinister may be going down. Here, again, I appreciate François Civil's convincing mix of bafflement and panic. He should be in complete control down here –this is what he’s spent his life mastering—and yet reality refuses to cooperate. This is so fundamentally unbalancing that he doesn’t even think to conceal his shock and panic, which consequently makes it so internal that it doesn’t read to his companions as quite as devastating and potentially dangerous as it is. That kind of upending of reality is a much richer source of horror than simple fear of the unknown, and helps build an escalating unease which is surprisingly effective. Sadly, the French cast gradually gets lost in the shuffle, supplanted by Feldman and Weeks, neither of whom has even the vaguest echo of human authenticity to them. Feldman, in particular, is a total non-entity, which is especially disappointing since apparently the actor suffered from claustrophobia and must have been disturbed beyond words by the work he was doing. It doesn’t end up on the screen, though. There's a time and place for method acting, but the only important thing is what the audience actually sees. Sometimes it's better to just follow Peter Lorre's advice and 'just makes faces.' Whatever Feldman is feeling, he’s not making the appropriate face.

The found-footage approach is never believable, and almost always ugly and unnecessary, but it does get at the essential point here: this is an experiential movie. Found-footage is a miserable medium, generally speaking, for telling a story, because of its constricting focus on specific visual perspectives. But it’s a much better medium for documenting an experience, one long incident which doesn’t call for narrative finesse so much as focused intensity. At its best, the conceit traps the viewer within some kind of ordeal, refusing to grant them the omniscient safety of unmotivated editing and forcing a grueling, intimate sense of being in the thick of it. The camerawork here doesn’t do that more than thoughtful standard photography could, and in many ways it highlights the phoniness of the whole scenario and potentially lessens the impact. But it does generally get the job done sufficiently, if not optimally. It’s at least the sort of found-footage movie which understands that it’s shooting for immediacy, not realism. It doesn’t capture the strange, alien feeling of being underground better than the immensely shitty TEMPLE, though, and that ain't a high bar to clear. But it does have better ideas: it establishes a baseline of reality strong enough that small disruptions in that reality, be they phony acting or deliberate continuity breaks, have real impact. And of all the real things, there is nothing more real than the stomach-churning power of those catacombs.

The catacombs themselves are, of course, the real star –as well they should be. The feeling of all those years and all that weight above as we descend lower and lower into a claustrophobic netherworld has some genuine, undeniable power, at least to someone with my particular constellation of weaknesses (claustrophobia, antiquarianism, and Catholicism). And the idea of being trapped, forced down, down, beyond the point of no return, beyond the point where anything makes sense, perhaps into Hell itself, evokes something one encounters only very rare in a horror movie: actual horror. Philosophical horror, horror that troubles the very waters of the soul. If the movie had trusted this instinct, it might have strayed dangerously close to genuinely great territory, and damn the ugly and unnecessary shaky-cam.

Unfortunately, the movie’s actual idea of horror pales in comparison to the basic factual horror of its premise, and so much of the end is concerned with scary silent people sitting in chairs facing away from you, monsters that suddenly pop out from behind walls, and various assorted haunted house detritus. Even if the movie’s very end is suitable mind-bending, the 20 minutes of wasted goodwill leading up to it drain much of its impact.

Still, it lingered in my mind. There's something visceral and potent here, and no amount of phony acting or tired jump scares can quite dissipate the oppressive, amorphous feel of gut-deep horror that comes with the endless, maddening descent into that alien subterranean hell where the living hold no power. They can weaken that feeling, but a few days later any irritation has passed, and the troubled dreams remain. It's a feeling bigger and more powerful than AS ABOVE SO BELOW is capable of handling or channeling effectively, but at least for a little while, it at least manages to unambiguously conjure it. I wish it were great, and I think greatness was, at least at some point in the conceptual stage, within its reach. But I’ll settle for good, and it is intermittently pretty good.

Also want to point out that it introduced me to the French punk/psychaedellic band La Femme, and I think this is love.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	The Only Way Out Is Down.
TITLE ACCURACY	Pretty good, since it’s a phrase which literally suggests that our crew is going underground, and also has both religious and mystic connotations.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA, though shot on-location in Paris, France
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Found-footage, haunted house, Religious horror,
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, ghosts
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	No. But there is a creepy piano!
EVIL CULT?	Yes, though we never learn much about it
MADNESS?	Certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None beyond the basic found-footage conceit.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Da Vinci Coding is more common than you might think, yet another possible career option I unwisely never considered.

Admittedly a weak 4-thumb effort, but it definitely managed to get to me at times, just enough to push it into distinctly positive territory.

Temple

Temple (2017)

Dir. Michael Barrett

Written by Simon Barrett, Story by Neal Edelstein, Shinya Egawa, Mike Macari

Starring Logan Huffman, Natalia Warner, Brandon Tyler Sklenar

TEMPLE (no "the") begins in the most tiresome possible way, with the lone survivor of a mysterious fatal incident being interviewed in police custody by a skeptical Japanese official (Naoto Takenaka, AZUMI, MANHUNT). The survivor’s face is bandaged to obscure his identity, which is not a good sign for viewers who don’t like to have their intelligence insulted. And that impression is reinforced as any lingering hope that this might still turn out to be the beginning of a story rather than a tedious framing narrative quickly fades with the inevitably segue into “five days earlier.” The events which would presumably be of official interests actually began the previous evening, but we’ll be getting a full five day lead-in because these particular police inspectors definitely want to hear about how this guy’s vacation went before tragedy struck. And otherwise, ahem, there probably would not be enough material here to get the film to feature length. This flashback structure will turn out to be, incidentally, both a horrible cliche and utter narrative nonsense, because the protagonists all split up for the climax, so it’s not even the survivor’s point of view we’re flashing back to. Apparently his testimony is so vivid and transporting that the listeners are able to visualize the entire story, even the parts that the teller was not present for. But thankfully they also have some found-footage to throw in there as well, just to complete the triumvirate of insufferable framing devices. What is this, an H. P. Lovecraft story?

Anyway, in the part of the movie which is not an unbearable framing narrative, a terrifyingly chipper young woman (Natalia Warner, THE DOUBLE) invites her totally platonic wink-wink male best friend (Logan Huffman, FINAL GIRL) to come to Japan and lurk just behind her and her Boyfriend (Brandon Sklenar, VICE), obsessively shooting video of them making out. As far as I can tell, this is the entire purpose of their Japanese expedition; certainly, it seems to occupy virtually all their time. Boyfriend is threatened and openly uninterested in hanging out with this random guy he’s never met before who has an intense, very touchy emotional relationship with his girlfriend. Which is, if hardly commendable, at least understandable, because Third Wheel Dude is intensely awkward and clearly interested in banging her. This is pretty much the most uncomfortable situation imaginable, which both men tactfully point out to zero acknowledgement from her, probably because she’s really more interested in having them videotape her while she gives unconvincing expository dialogue while staring into the camera with a huge fake smile and empty, terrifying eyes.

Recognizing that this is an delicate social situation, they immediately agree to all stay in the same hotel room, and of course Boyfriend and Camgirl are gonna need a better excuse than that not to have hot naked sex above the covers, which suits Third Wheelie just fine, since he can silently but not exactly subtly videotape them doing that, too. I’d say this behavior is creepy beyond belief, but guys, you fuck naked on the floor of an empty room three feet away from a pervy Jake Gyllenhaal lookin’ dude, you had to know this is what would happen. I have no idea how any of them ultimately feel about any of this, because in addition to being the three most unpleasant characters on earth, they’re also the three most placid actors on earth, spending a lot of time basically just staring vaguely into space.

I have now described by far the most terrifying section of the film, which is the part where the world’s three most intolerable white people not named ‘Trump’ vacation together. But this must eventually become some sort of horror movie, so in keeping with tradition they also take some time to establish that in addition to being profoundly socially uncomfortable, they’re all also dolts of the highest order. Third Wheel speaks Japanese, but he seems genuinely startled when a guy in a bar points out that Japanese books go from right to left, a little detail one would have assumed had come up already. He also “translates” English dialogue spoken by Japanese people to his colleagues, a habit so asinine that I've seen it played for comedy before, but which here is presented in complete earnestness. This would be infuriating enough all by itself, but when you add that he also translates basically every fucking sentence he hears into English even though we can see the subtitles --making every conversation at least twice the length it needs to be-- we’re pretty much rooting for this guy to get Temple’d to death with maximum speed. Also at one point he nods to blind guy. What a jackass.

Anyway, they end up at a bookstore and try to buy a mysterious off-inventory evil book which happens to be sitting around there, a move that distresses the bookseller enough that she immediately refuses and closes her shop, but not quite enough for her to actually say aloud “No, don’t buy that, it’s an evil book.” Fortunately, Third Wheelie returns in the dead of night, when the evil ghost child (Yamato Tazawa, Honto ni Atta Kowai Hanashi Summer Special 2016) working the midnight shift at the bookshop will happily hand him the book he wants for no payment, which he seems to think is a real validation of his clever negotiating technique. Are we sure this guy’s not a Trump?

The book in question at first seems like complete gibberish, and then some guy in a bar tells him to try reading it from right to left because it’s written in Japanese, and after that it makes perfect sense. Turns out it’s a book of hidden arcane knowledge about a secret TEMPLE that can only be entered using special knowledge of… oh wait, it’s actually right down the road, there's a bus stop and everything. The ghosts or whatever could have just handed them a tourism pamphlet. But oh well, the book does its job, because now Camgirl is absolutely fucking desperate to go to this temple, despite everyone they meet along the way politely but firmly warning them it’s evil and haunted and almost inevitably fatal and it would be a bad idea to go there, especially when there are basically more fucking temples than Starbucks in Japan and the vast majority are conveniently unhaunted. A representative incident: while they’re walking to their demise (because no one will ferry them there, you know, for fear of the evil) they meet an old guy who tells Wheelie the story of some jackass who, back in the day, went to the temple like an idiot even though everyone told him not to, and “came back holding his eyes.” When Wheelie translates this to his companions in his typical excruciating way, he puts his fingers to his eyes as though he’s covering them. ‘No, no,” says the guy, grabbing two convenient oranges and holding them face up in the palms of his hands. “Like this.” “OK, I don’t understand,” our boy says, and fucks off. “Mucho Arigato” says the Boyfriend. Guys, guys, I already wanted these fuck-os dead, you don’t have to keep doing more to convince me.

The closer they get to the Haunted Temple Of Evil, the more obviously concerning supernatural shit starts to happen, starting with the fact that the evil ghost child bookstore employee who sold them the book in the first place suddenly turns up again, and seems suspiciously focused on facilitating their little day trip of evil. They’re Americans, though, so it never dawns on them to consider that this little tyke is a little too eager to cater to their caprices. And that’s not the only red flag; they encounter a weird old lady with (growths? ears?) under her hair, marching monks with baskets over their heads, and I’m pretty sure I saw that one-legged umbrella guy from the YOKAI MONSTERS movies.* Granted, because it’s Japan, it’s hard to tell what are supernatural horrors and what are just really committed perverts, but still, guys, come on. They breeze through every warning sign and you’ll be very surprised to hear that when they finally do get to the temple in question, they discover it is indeed evil and haunted just like literally everyone they met told them. By this point we’re glad enough just to see them killed off for being such dipshits, and wouldn’t be fussy about the details. Pleasantly, though, in a rare concession to people who would want to see something entertaining happen in a movie, towards the very, very, very end we do get a few seconds of some kinda nifty multi-headed wolf monster and a couple sharp-toothed children. But not much. And certainly not nearly enough to justify watching a whole movie.

Even if there's rarely anything interesting on-screen, though, at least it's visually legible most of the time, which was by no means a given. Considering how much they threaten it, there’s less found footage in here than I initially feared, which my lawyer informs me is sufficient to keep the movie from being technically classified as a crime against humanity. Still, one would hope for slightly more visual ambition here, considering director Michael Barnett is usually cinematographer Michael Barnett (KISS KISS BANG BANG, YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, TED, GOTTI) and this is his first film as a director (his cinematographer here is Cory Geryak, a longtime gaffer/camera tech [PUMPKINHEAD2: BLOOD WINGS, THE DARK KNIGHT[!]]). Sadly that does not appear to be the case; the characters say they need to get home before dark, but it’s hard to tell when that is since everything is constantly tinted fucking blue like a goddamn UNDERWORLD movie. It’s possible that it's not the movie's fault because the country of Japan is covered by an enormous cerulean lampshade and other movies just balance it out with artificial yellow lighting. I can’t rule that out, but I think it’s more likely some kind of color-correction horseshit.

Why are these people blue?

Which raises the question: do cinematographers really like that, or did the director, having spent his previous career as a cinematographer, seize this opportunity to fuck up some other cinematographer's work just as other directors had done to him, continuing the cycle of misery? It makes everything look like it has an Instagram filter on it. I mean, it’s not a complete disaster, and some of it looks nice enough; there’s a portion at the end which takes place in a cave illuminated only by a single flashlight, and the camera does a nice job of giving us a sense of the claustrophobic, alien world down there, effectively using hard light and pitch dark to play with our anxieties. It’s not really an eyesore, just drab. But what’s up with all the color tinting? Why would hardworking professionals who care about image allow the final product to look like someone spilled a bottle of ink on the film? I know Steven Soderbergh did it once, but guys, he’s done everything once. You weren’t supposed to make this a thing. 

(the cave sequence is much better)

I’ve seen uglier, of course, and I’ve seen much more incompetent, and even more pointless. But being kicked in the head by a human is definitely better than being kicked in the head by a horse, and I still I wouldn’t recommend either one. There might be a germ of a good idea in cribbing details from Japanese folklore for a modern-set horror movie (the script is by frequent Adam Wingard scribe Simon Barrett** [DEAD BIRDS, YOU’RE NEXT]) but they just barely register here, while the intolerable and interminable non-relationship drama between these three bland anti-actors takes up virtually the entire runtime. The listless direction doesn’t help matters, but this really is just a dysfunctional script. For one thing, I can’t imagine why it makes sense to have this story be about visiting Americans rather than native Japanese people, a conceit that serves only to clutter the plot with needless exposition and to impart upon the whole scenario a simmering low-key xenophobic cast that sours any hope for goofy fun. But that’s only the beginning of the structural problems here; you’ve also got the useless vestigial framing narrative, a hopelessly confused lack of clear point-of-view, and a complete absence of narrative conflict, or, hell, narrative in general. There’s maybe five relevant minutes of plot before the 50 minute mark, and even then, it’s only in the last 15 minutes that anything really happens. Not an acceptable return on investment, even at at merciful 78 minutes. Other than a few fleeting glimpses of local Japanese color, there’s just no content here. I’ve seen films which are technically much worse, but few which make as feeble a case for their own existence.

* Warning: I may have imagined this last detail as my brain instinctively worked to protect me from having to rip my eyes out and hold them in the palms of my hands out of boredom.

** I suspect that Simon and Michael Barrett are related in some way, but I cannot find any information which directly confirms that.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, which is pretty representative of the level of effort on display here.
TITLE ACCURACY	Can’t deny that a temple does end up being pretty relevant to this wisp of a story. Interesting that it’s just called TEMPLE and not THE TEMPLE.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA / Japan
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Demons
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, though Simon Barrett has enough horror scripts under his belt to earn me recognizing his name.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Yes, probably
CREEPY DOLLS?	Some creepy statuary
EVIL CULT?	None, as far as I can tell religion isn’t the source of the problem with the titular temple
MADNESS?	Possibly?
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	You’d think it would be “don’t invite a creepy third wheel openly lusting after you to follow you and your boyfriend and videotape you making out” but actually all that works out fine, really the only lesson here is “don’t go to that temple that everyone says not to go to because it is haunted and evil and inevitably fatal.”