Evidence (2012)

A group of friends head off for a weekend trip into the wilderness (yes, that plot line again), to make what sounds like the worst Documentary of all time; Brett's first time camping! Seriously, Brett has never been camping before, so the d-bag of the group, Ryan, decides to make a Documentary about his first experience... camping.

It's not long before our group of campers start seeing and hearing odd things in the woods, both during the day and at night. Morons that they are, they write off the strange occurrences to being a gang of rogue coyotes.  

Ryan, the aforementioned d-bag filmmaker of the group, insists on capturing every waking moment of their trip on film, shoving the camera in people's faces despite their hints of "Fuck off, Ryan!" and "Get that camera out of my face, you raging fucktard!"

Everything was all fun and camera games at the beginning...

For a while there, I thought Ryan was the villain of the movie. Despite the noises and sightings of something less than human which seemed to be stalking them, and everyone's screaming pleas of "let's go home!" over and over again, he just kinda blew them off in the name of his shitty Documentary. Snarky little prick.

Had I been on this camping trip, Ryan would have caught a beating with his own camera.

I do applaud his attempt at getting his girlfriend naked on cam though.

The rest of the crew wasn't much better; the other guy, Brett, was a whiny bitch most of the time;  Abi, Ryan's girlfriend, seemed to like being verbally abused by him; and the other chick, Ashley, screamed way too much... sometimes for no good reason at all. The actors were actually solid and did a great job, but as the movie wore on, their characters became more and more annoying. Their actions became more and more illogical too, as is par for the course with most genre flicks like this.

The crazy thing about Evidence is that it starts of fairly typical, following the trappings of the POV/Hand Held genre almost to a T, but as things move along, the movie heads into definite WTF?!? territory. To say too much about it would give a lot of the twists away, but suffice it to say that it started out as a Backwoods Horror flick, turned into a monster movie, and ended up in The Crazies neck of the woods. Most of it worked well though, despite the annoying characters, and managed to maintain plenty of tension throughout.

There's always a cabin in the woods, isn't there?

Again, as seems to be the case with most Horror flicks these days, the ending was more of a cop-out than anything else. Why do so many Horror movies these days leave the audience with tons of questions and basically no resolution to anything by the time the credits roll? I'm all for ambiguity, and I really don't like to be spoon fed, but can we get some semblance of closure at least? Maybe let us in on a little bit of what the hell just happened, and then leave us to stew over the rest?

You really need to understand that the movie got REALLY crazy at the end. It was good, but it felt like so many new and unexplained things were being thrown at us left and right, that we weren't meant to understand it. The movie also went into shaky-cam overdrive in parts, and especially for most of the 3rd reel, which might have added to the confusion a bit.

"...and out of the dark came Butternut, whispering a warning to us all. A warning that we didn't quite understand, because horses can't actually whisper..."

If you like Found Footage flicks, or at least the ones that don't suck, then you really need to see this one. Evidence is one of the better first person flicks that we've seen lately, even if the craziness of it all left us wondering what the fuck just happened. Well written, well acted, and effectively tense, it's nice to actually come away from a hand held flick actually pleased for a change. Check this one out when you get the chance.

B

Girls kissing is never a bad thing. Well sometimes it is, but only if the chicks are really ugly.

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