Day 11 of Halloween - The Taking of Deborah Logan

Jason: I am not a big proponent of the found-footage style of movie making. Shaky cam makes my head hurt.And usually, those kinds of movies are light on the scares, choosing to fill in the extra space with overly emotional reaction shots. Keeping all of that in mind, The Taking Of Deborah Logan is not a typical example of this style. Not for the most part, anyways. Starting out as a doctoral thesis documentary about a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s and her deterioration from it, the camera work is pretty steady and is set up to be watchable. It looks like a camcorder but it isn’t all over the place. Of course, by the end, there is no stability at all and you only get glimpses of what’s going on around as the video cuts in and out and the sound is all echoey and distorted. But that isn’t what makes this one hard to watch. The depiction of the disease, while not 100% medically accurate, is emotionally spot on. Deborah is being cared for by her daughter, Sarah. Both are emotionally strung out from the ordeal of Deborah’s mind going and getting worse every day. The genuine raw feels that come from Sarah when talking about and dealing with her mother are visceral and feel true. It’s only when things take a turn for the supernatural that those kind of fade to the background to be replaced by terror and fear. If you were to remove a few key scenes that depict ghostly and monstrous events, this could legitimately feel like a documentary about Alzheimer’s. And that is scary enough without being possessed by the evil snake demon spirit of a long dead serial killer.

Joel: Ok, we need to take a moment to discuss found footage as a genre. Most people will be happy to tell you what they don’t like about the genre, the shaky camera work and other things like that. But we put up with it because we get to pretend that this is undoctored, and unedited footage of something scary. We know that effects are being added to the movie, just as they are to every horror movie, but we get to pretend that it footage that has been found and released to show something unnatural that was caught on camera. That’s part of the enjoyment of a found footage movie. So when you release a found footage movie like this one, that has clear and intentional edits to make it feel more like a polished and completed documentary, all of that goes straight out the window. You mean to tell me that the editor of the footage is going to take time to edit in computer animations, but isn’t going to edit out the part where she lies to her subject to get what she wants? And if this is supposed to be a real thesis project, you would think that maybe the swear words would be edited out, or at least bleeped. While I do appreciate that the movie takes time to delve into what Alzheimer’s really is and how it works, the fact that the movie can’t do that without magically turning into a finished documentary, and then back into a found footage movie when it suits itself is lazy. When you say it’s a found footage movie the footage is supposed to feel found. That’s the point.

Chris: No, no, no, nopety, nope nope. I can’t do found footage movies. I simply can’t and I wish I could sit here and say it’s for reasons that Joel gave in his review but I really can’t because I’m simply too jittery and too on edge for stuff like this. I’m a jumpy person, somebody walks around the corner too fast in front of me and I jump. It doesn’t mean I’m scared of corners, I just get surprised easily. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the crap out of Cloverfield and I think, simply from a structure standpoint, it’s the best found footage movie out there (just as long as you didn’t watch it in theaters because that’ll give you a migraine). But from a horror found footage standpoint? I don’t understand how any of you jerks find this to be a good time in any way. What you people considered a good time, I consider torture. It’s cheap, it’s dumb, I don’t like it and I hate you all for liking this stuff. And I understand the irony in saying all this because I did write a script that was (in a way) inspired by Cannibal Holocaust (a 1980 found footage movie) but that was more because of the madness that surrounded the movie and it’s director after the fact. Don’t judge me...but I’ll gladly judge all of you for liking this stuff. 3-7-1.