Another day, another found footage review. Hey, as long as people are looking, baby, so am I. So let’s look.
OH, hey, we’re looking at EYES IN THE DARK which sounds ominous but since you shouldn’t be able to SEE Most eyes in the dark it seems like that’s their problem not my problem. Unless that is, THEY EYES GLOW BECAUSE THEY’RE FREAKIN’ MONSTERS!
You heard it here first, friends, glowy monster eyes are no good. Not if you value an intact throat and insides on the inside and not on the everywhere else-sides. The world is hard enough without freaky monster voyeurs but let’s dive in, shall we?
Presented as if these are FBI files being accessed by someone with clearance, EYES IN THE DARK is a found footage film that has one main group of protagonists and some other characters that pop in and out of things. While the film jumps around as different video media is accessed the heart of the film follows a group of (very obnoxious) friends as they head into the mountains for a weekend getaway. They are loud, they are lewd, and they are there for fun. What they don’t know is that there have been a series of disappearances in the area that, while it hasn’t closed the area, certainly has made the surrounding woods unwelcoming. When the caretaker of the house they are renting begins to tell them about local myths that warn of ‘eyes in the dark’ and they start to find traces of strange occurrences in the area all they can do is try to survive the horrors that lurk in the night.
The presentation is pretty well done and engaging, offering different evidence for different encounters with the things in the woods. While we are never really given much solid information on what the things are, they sure sound and look like werewolves, though it seems they may be something else. The story gets pretty silly, the acting goes from decent to obnoxious, and it is heavy on the shaky camera work. It’s an interesting premise that’s just too mired in the obvious and doesn’t try to do anything unique with the story. There are ways to make this more interesting and to intensify the fear without elaborate monster suits. As it stands the film could be called Off-Screen, the Movie because pretty much everything of interest is happening off-screen. With very little budget they needed to invest in what they had and that’s characters. Instead of making them caricatures and basically meat puppets, they could have fleshed them out more and made the horror they face more impactful.
As I say, it’s an interesting premise that just doesn’t do much and, while longer run times are not always a great idea, for a movie like this they needed a little time to build things up. Add some more scenes. As it stands the film feels disjointed from how the footage is presented – not as a pseudo-doc but as someone accessing information seemingly at random – so it comes off as vignettes strung together to make a feature.
It’s OK and some fans may dig that it’s a monster movie. I just wish they’d spent more time on the build up and less on the shaky cam running.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1561479/
2 out of 5
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