Exists presents another pointless variation of the found footage horror movie. It mainly follows Brian (Chris Osborn), a would-be Youtube sensation who has stolen the keys to his uncle’s secluded forest cabin. He invites his little brother and his friends out there, apparently hoping to shoot some footage that he can upload to the Internet. But on the way there, they hit something on the road. And that something follows them all the way to the cabin. It destroys their car and the cabin’s generator. It traps them in the middle of the woods, and starts picking them off one by one.
The opening text gives away the nature of the threat. The film claims that there have been 3,000 sightings of Bigfoot in the US. This weird little factoid is then turned into a very generic horror movie setup. The film doesn’t really take advantage of any unique elements of the Bigfoot mythos. It instead just sticks a bunch of dumb kids in the woods and has Bigfoot attack them. It’s as lazy as horror movie premises get. You could replace Bigfoot in this movie with any other threat and it wouldn’t make much of a difference at all.
It is, in fact, the exact thing that Cabin in the Woods was subverting. The film displays a painful shortage of new ideas. None of these characters are remotely interesting. They are mostly terrible to each other, and offer absolutely no reason to root for any of them. The women are barely given any character traits. They exist because the genre demands that there be women, preferably the type that get into skimpy outfits and scream. The men are mainly dumb as rocks, and spend too much of their time posturing against each other and a clearly superior threat.
Worse yet, the film is a found footage movie that clearly should have been shot conventionally. Director Eduardo Sanchez, who is one of the filmmakers behind the progenitor of the genre, The Blair Witch Project, does none of the work to make the conceit believable in any way. The film opens on the characters in a car, where they apparently have a camera mounted in the front, recording every moment they spend inside. Why are they recoding any of this? This is a question that pops up all throughout the movie.
There are too many points where Brian is recording things when it makes no sense whatsoever. There’s a portion, for example, where one of the other characters gets mad at him and takes the camera’s memory card away. Apparently, the very next thing that Brian does is put in another memory card and immediately start recording again. A rational person would maybe try to defuse the situation and not agitate his already angry friend. But the film cannot conceive of any rational thought. It instead just uses the most convenient elements of the genre, ignoring reality completely as it puts together its rote scares.
Exists is a major waste of time. The film’s misguided attempt to make Bigfoot scary is undermined by the complete laziness of its construction. It deals only in the hoariest of horror movie clichés, and it applies an aesthetic that it can’t really justify. It isn’t even bad in interesting ways. The film invests so little in having its own identity. It just wants to be another random title among the endless parade of found footage horror movies. Sanchez may have been instrumental in bringing the genre to life, but this movie makes him out to be little more than a hack.
My Rating:
