There are all kinds of terrors in the latest triple feature from my streaming watchlist, but all three movies have one thing in common—nothing really happens until the final act. Let’s find out if it was worth watching the first few acts to get there….
DEEP FEAR (2022)
What kind of half-assed attempt at a horror movie is this? Virtually nothing substantial happens in its 80-minute runtime.
A group of friends decides to party in the Paris catacombs. After a whole lot of nothing happens to give us some character development, they encounter a bunch of skinheads. They get the better of the skinheads and take off. And that’s the last we see of the skinheads.
56 minutes in they find a room full of Nazi stuff and quickly discover something is down there with them. Next, we see what looks like a zombie dog for about ten seconds, and that’s the last we see of him.
70 minutes in we finally see that what’s living underground is a Nazi zombie. He quickly kills off most of the group and then the final girl attempts to make her way to the exit.
Why wouldn’t they have members of the group periodically getting killed off throughout the movie instead of all at once? Why wouldn’t they have the skinheads getting what they deserve by an actual Nazi to up the body count and for the pure joy of watching Nazis getting slaughtered? Why was everything, which wasn’t much of anything, saved for the last fifteen minutes?
ASHBURN WATERS (2019)
This 80-minute movie about kids, a cabin, and a creature does its best to deliver its simple, cliché horror story, and does a good job of giving us that retro vibe of flicks from the late 90s and early 2000s in the process. The biggest issue is the slow pacing. All the horror is jammed into the last twenty minutes or so.
After an opening kill sequence that keeps the threat a mystery, we meet a group of friends heading to party at a cabin in the woods. The big story here is the main guy still coping with his breakup only to find his ex-girlfriend is coming with her new man. Yawn. We don’t need these overdone conflicts. Just mutilate people, dammit!
There’s lots of partying montage material, and there’s a dude creeping around the woods that looks like he is maybe supposed to be Native American.
It’s not until 37 minutes in that the main guy gets knocked over by some sort of creature in the woods. The first dead friend is found 47 minutes in. A girl is dragged out of her tent in a shadow puppet format 55 minutes in.
Then the battle of the exes comes to fruition. Really? Now, just when the monster is kicking it into high gear?
The final act shows the full monster Monty, and it’s a pretty standard, glowing-eyes creature. It goes to battle with the main group of survivors, just like you’d expect. It’s all very much like something you would have seen on the SyFy network back in the day. Good for a rainy Sunday perhaps.
DAGR (2024)
If you love found footage flicks, I don’t think you can exactly go wrong watching this one. Like most found footage flicks, it drags until the final act, when the horror finally comes fast, furious, and in flurry of blurry visuals.
I’ll keep this short. Two girls trying to become YouTube sensations decide to pose as caterers at a photo shoot at an old mansion in order to do some looting.
After lots of time is spent introducing us to the two girls and the photo shoot crew, the two main girls finally start secretly exploring the mansion. They find an iPad that already has some video footage from the photo shoot on it.
Would you believe this becomes found footage within found footage? We watch the footage the girls found, which features the photo shoot crew going through some supernatural stuff, the most notable being a robed, cloaked figured terrorizing them.
That typical found footage movie eventually shifts to the found footage of the two main girls being terrorized by the cult-like figure right up until a chase scene through the woods.
It’s as cliché as found footage horror gets, with no explanation as to the origins of this cult figure and his cult rituals.
