Review: Evil Things
Evil Things (2009)
Release Date: TBD
Directed by: Dominic Perez
Cast: Lauren Casillo, Morgan Hooper, Ryan Maslyn, Elyssa Mersdorf, Torrey Weiss
Review by: Marc Patterson
I don’t like getting official notices of ANYTHING in the mail. Not even tax forms. I’m a little paranoid that way. Not that I have anything to be paranoid of, but I’m just the type of guy who keeps a close watch on my surroundings pretty much at all times. So when I got a piece of mail from “Agent D. Perez” sent from “Field Office 222″ you can imagine my heart skipped a beat for just one second. Keep that heart stopping moment in the back of your mind if you will. As I looked more closely I could see that the package was sent to me “c/o BrutalAsHell.com” and at this point I breathed a sigh of relief. They hadn’t come to get me yet! Now, totally curious, I tore open what I knew to be a screener only to discover an official letter from the U.S. Department of Justice outlining a missing persons case for five college aged students. At the bottom of the letter was a standard disclaimer debunking the letter to not actually be from the Dept of Justice, but from Dominic Perez, writer and director of Evil Things. Not for nothing, this was bar none the most creative appeal for a film I’ve yet received from anyone, including professional PR agencies. However, the critic in me knew that one thing was guaranteed – a slick letter for a missing persons case (enclosed with a DVD of “evidence” for my review) doesn’t make a good film. It’s just good marketing.
Evil Things is “found footage” style filmmaking in the vein of The Blair Witch Project and the more recent sensation, Paranormal Activity. It follows a group a five college students who are headed out of New York City for a weekend in the Catskills of upstate New York at a house that belongs to the family of Cassandra Crawford, one of the five kids. It’s Cassie’s twenty-first birthday and this cold winter outing to a secluded house in NY is supposed to be the perfect getaway. On the way out of the city they encounter bad winter road conditions, during which, they are passed on the road by a real dilhole driving a maroon cargo van. The driver of the van suddenly stops in the middle of the road, and when the kids go to drive around the van they manage to inadvertently invoke a bit of road rage from the van driver. Not the time or place for road rage. Driving in a winter storm is dangerous enough on its own. Remember that feeling of paranoia I mentioned above? That heart stopping moment of dread? Cue that up right about now. Said van driver is revealed to clearly have some darker motivations. These kids just can’t quite lose him. Eventually they make it to the house and settle in, but then weird stuff slowly starts happening all over again until it culminates in an ending that is as much a foregone conclusion as the end of The Blair Witch Project. The whole affair is conveniently documented by one of the kids named Leo, a film student who always keeps a camera rolling wherever they go; however, in a creative twist, there is some other handiwork at play, but I don’t want to give away any spoilers.
Technically speaking, Evil Things is a cleanly shot film. This isn’t shot on a cheap DV hand-cam, which is a good thing for viewers. It also bodes well that one of the students is a burgeoning filmmaker, which means he happens to have good enough equipment that you don’t get the nauseating shaky cam effect, well at least not much. Acting wise, the film was refreshingly solid. Most of the dialogue felt genuine and not forced which really helped sell the fear factor. There were a few lulls where the action dropped off and viewer boredom set in, but overall the film was highly effectual and had me making sure the curtains were closed while I watched it.
The action is helped along by some low, droning background noises and effects, something added into the film, which elevates it above simple found footage. At first you may be wondering “How can they do that if this is found footage?” Yes, it’s a cheap trick that could have been done without, but how this is justifiably brought into the film will be explained at the end, and again – kudos to Perez for working in some of these added production values to make a more full end product, rather than just delivering us a group of crazy kids screaming through the cold winter woods of NY. Simple fact is… most common film viewers won’t even realize they SHOULDN’T be hearing a score of any sort in this type of film.
Ultimately, despite some rather minor flaws, Dominic Perez delivers a shockingly fun and genuinely creepy film, and I have to admit, I really enjoyed it from beginning to end. It’s a shame that this film will find an ill-timed release in the wake of Paranormal Activity; otherwise, this would have been a real groundbreaking project. Sadly, it’s likely to be looked upon as imitation of both Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project, and quickly disregarded for being such. And that’s a real tragedy because imitation this may be, but it’s imitation done well.
