The Borderlands

Bon film !

After reading a lot of the reviews for this film I had such high hopes for a scary film with an interesting plot... i'm Afraid all the people who left reviews must have been watching a different film! The only positive I can give is that the Scottish mans acting was great and he was very believable... the plot however was lame and went nowhere... there was not a single frightening moment apart from when one of the guys jumps up from behind a pew and makes you jump... the end left more questions than there were answers and overall it was just pretty terrible. Very disappointed.

So-called "found footage" movie making annoys me. It is disorientating, head ache inducing and, in my experience has absolutely NOTHING in its favour. It is completely repellent. The idiotic, too close framing and jittering do absolutely nothing to make a movie more convincing or "feel real". Everything about this ill-considered fad is awful and absolutely nothing is good. After only a couple of minutes, I was tempted to walk out and, having sat through this boring garbage to the bitter, pointless end, I really wished I had. Putting the jittery camera work completely to one side, the "story" was so weak and unconvincing as to be barely existent. I didn't give a flying one for any of the characters and the end was a total flop. There were no saving graces. I have seen a huge number of horror films and this was one of the most disappointing, mainly because hopes were raised too high by overly enthusiastic, self-indulgent scribes who are far too easily impressed by pretentious, vacuous, utterly pointless nonsense.

So , looking for a movie to watch and found this one.. impressed by the high IMDb rating , I started reading the reviews; which were glowing !! So I spent the $5 and rented it - bad mistake. The acting is great. It's found footage and that's always annoying , the story takes about a half hour for anything to happen.. just rather boring and irritating character development. One of the 3 main characters is just awful. Text book annoying guy. This just wasn't a good movie. 75% of it is mild and totally uninteresting "scares" , they even throw in a very typical jump scare , which to me is so lame. The last 15 minutes are the "climax" and it's just more shaky cameras and - this is like something my brother would have made with his friends in high school. Very low tech. Screaming , camera cutting out and blood squirting out of mouths. I am easily scared and not hard to please. But this movie, for me was awful. Just not good at all. So I wanted to save everyone else from this ... if you like found footage , there is better out there. In fact a great film that is independent and free on Netflix and similar topic wise is "The Shrine". Another good one is "The Bay" another one is "Exists" all of these found footage and all better than this.

I couldn't look at the screen for half of this movie. It was way too psychotic and shocking! This is a good thing obviously for horror fans lulz. There were so many shock moments like when the Jesus statue falls off the wall, I never expected that to happen. The priest kills himself because he doesn't think anyone believes in his miracle. This is interesting because why would you kill yourself for that? Unless, he was possessed by the demon. At the start, the people are in the Church and stuff starts happening and shaking on the table etc. The priest thinks it's maybe a miracle, but inside I think he knows that there is a demon that has attached itself to him and his Chirch. So I'm not sure if he killed himself to kill the demon? Or did the demon possess his body and kill the body? This movie is really good because it keeps you guessing and the tension is ever-present.

Good POV style horror with a great balance of realism and demonic supernaturalism with one of the most horrifying endings I can recall.

I won't talk about the story because I don't want to give anything away. I went into this knowing little, and that's the best way to approach it. Those put off by the fact that this is found footage, need to bear in mind that (as the actor Gordon Kennedy recently pointed out), 'found footage' is no longer a gimmick but a genre of its own or, if you like, a horror sub genre. Complaining about a movie being another found footage movie is like complaining about Saving Private Ryan being another war movie. Anyway. . . Having read a lot of mixed reviews about this movie I decided to trust one radio reviewer's opinion and watch it. I had heard people complain that the dialogue was bad (completely untrue) and that the movie was boring (what?) but found myself riveted all the way through to the ending which was not only a surprise, but genuinely affecting in the same slightly baffling but very disturbing way that Ben Wheatley's Kill List ended. Any horror movie that removes all doubt by the end isn't doing a very good job in my opinion anyway. It's the WTF? element that really puts the icing on the cake and heightens the terror. For a small budget movie I think they did very well. They kept the scope of the story narrow, the locations simple and focused on atmosphere and tension. The acting was very good by all parties and on a technical level its clear (even to someone not in the filmmaking business like me) that everyone knew exactly what they were doing. I've seen so many low-budget horrors that make me wonder how some people are allowed to go near a camera, but in this case filmmaking is exactly what these people should be doing. In some ways it could be called formulaic. It certainly owes a debt to movies like The Blair Witch Project, but it does something knew, and the ending is all its own. Wow. . . What an ending. Incidentally I read in an interview with the filmmakers that the movie originally had a different title, which in fact gives more away than the movie itself about what is going on. The Borderlands is a much better title because of its ambiguity. Great movie which I'm looking forward very much to seeing again.

I didn't hate this film, but it disappointed me in scene after scene. The characters are pretty dull, the story is weak and progresses too slowly, the scares are too few and too cheap (largely jump scares and false flags), and the ending is stupid. People in found footage films tend to do silly things, and this can have an alienating effect on the audience. This film is a really good example of that trend. In the climax of the film, the characters end up doing unbelievably dumb things, which, of course, gets them killed. Also, in the true found footage manner, nothing is ever explained. It's very convenient for the screen writer, is it not, to be able to throw all kinds of silly and confusing things at the audience, and never have to explain them, because in the final scene the characters all end up dead, and there is no one left to explain anything. Ultimately the thrill of found footage is the ride itself, and this ride picks up pace only at the end, which is a huge detriment. Had the plot been intelligent and cleverly developed, this wouldn't have been the problem. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

I gotta say, The Borderlands is actually very funny in places, they took a great risk tying together humour and scares but for some bizarre reason, it certainly works. I fully enjoyed both elements of the film, and it's acted really, really well (and filmed the same). The tale follows some investigators sent by the Vatican to check out a claim by a local priest of a possession in an old church. One of the investigators isn't a religious man however, just a tech guy there to do all the video stuff etc. Hes the funny one, and I kinda felt the humour amplified the scares when they came. When it gets to a screaming sheep set on fire (yes really) it is quite shocking as it's unexpected. And from there it swings from light hearted banter (never forced) to heavy shocks. I enjoyed it, and thought I wouldn't. Definitely worth a watch.

Last year a film was released named 'In Fear', which managed to make the premise of two people getting lost in a maze of country roads as night draws in surprisingly creepy and gripping, before the final act gave way to a more pedestrian nature and the film lost its footing. 'The Borderlands', a British entry into the canon of handy-cam/found footage horror, manages to work it the other way round. Not to say the first hour or so is pedestrian as such, but going by the premise, no doubt many people will think they have seen it all before and skip this film. They would be partly right, although to the film's credit, it manages to tread that old ground with a good enough script and performances to not seem tired. Deacon, Gray and Mark are Vatican sanctioned, paranormal investigators who arrive in a small, west country town to look into a claim of miracles at a local, old church. Things take a darker turn as their investigation leads them to increasingly unrealistic scientific explanations for the claim. The characters are very real and their relationship is not weighed down by forced efforts to be unnecessarily scary. Indeed, there is an occasional moment of brevity and humour between them, which nicely offsets the apparently tedious nature of their job; one could draw a comparison with the first act of Neil Marshall's 'The Descent', coincidentally another well regarded British horror. Another intelligent point arises in the form of the characters' set of beliefs; refreshingly, it is the agnostic technical supervisor who is most inclined to believe the extraordinary explanation, whilst the believers are the ones jaded by the claims so often proved false. It must also be said that where in other, similar fare, the explanation of the use of home video cameras and the like seems forced and a little intrusive, here it makes perfect sense and you do actually forget that is what you are watching. Then we hit the last 20 minutes! Some earlier chatter about belief proves to not just be screenplay-filling fodder, but real groundwork that actually comes back to bite hard in claustrophobic scenes. This final act's power to disturb is akin to the final moments of 'The Blair Witch Project', 'Rosemary's Baby', or perhaps more pertinently 'The Wicker Man', to which the smart screenplay has actually made humorous and perhaps not purely incidental reference. In these cases, the horrible reality of the story is made truly tangible in such a way as to cause a palpable discomfort within the gut of the audience; it creates a creeping unease that is hard to express in words. So it is the case with 'The Borderlands', although how unnerved you are is not completely clear until after the film, when the imagery of the idea being brought to its fruition cements in your mind's eye, and as with Edward Woodward's final, defiant yelling, or Mia Farrow's famous last lines, a character's dreadful cries become horribly haunting in a way that is tough to shake off simply by saying, "It's only a movie'. 'The Borderlands' is not overcooked and has much about it that will probably be admired by fans of writer/director Ben Wheatley, who is maybe most noted right now for 'Kill List'. Overall, not one we might call a great horror film, but without doubt, within the film are moments of great horror!