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Kether Donohue

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Girls Against Boys

The Bay

The "found-footage" horror movie has run its course.

Of course, after watching his awful 1998 deep sea horror thriller Sphere, I would have said the same thing about director Barry Levinson's aspirations to genre horror.

The Bay proves me wrong on both counts.

Levinson's creepy thriller, more deserving of a theatrical release than most of the horror stuff that actually makes into the multiplexes, posits a hushed-up ecological disaster in a Maryland coastal town off Chesapeake Bay.

The story is cobbled together from security cameras, smart phones, police car dash cams, and the surviving news footage of novice TV reporter Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), who functions as a sole surviving witness to the disastrous events of July 4, 2009.

Something is seriously wrong in the town of Claridge. A pair of marine biologists turned up dead while investigating a "dead zone" in the bay, polluted by a particularly toxic combination of steroid-laden chicken poop from a farm adjacent to the water and a slow-moving nuclear runoff.

During the Fourth of July celebrations, the townspeople start to succumb to a nasty combination of skin rash and nausea. A couple of "murder victims" turn up in the peaceful town, their tongues and other organs mutilated or missing altogether.

Soon, poor Donna and her cameraman are wandering the deserted streets of Claridge, and instead of fireworks, the only sounds to be heard are distant screams, while much of the population is dying messily in the local hospital under the watch of a heroic but biologically outgunned ER doctor (Stephen Kunken).

The narrative is necessarily fragmented and the action is literally all over the map. But Levinson, working from a script by screenwriter Michael Wallach, keep things driving forward with its low-key performances (Donohue is especially right as an inexperienced reporter) and cheap but effective, gruesome special effects. It helps that the film's central monster, a primitive parasite given a new lease on life by a man-made toxic soup, is chillingly credible. HHH1/2

Girls Against Boys

This rape-revenge movie owes much to Abel Ferrara's 1981 cult movie Ms. 45.

The unfortunate difference is that writer-director Austin Chick deliberately distances himself from Ferrara's grungy, gritty New York esthetic. Girls Against Boys charts the same course of righteous female rage dive-bombing into madness. But it's a slicker, prettier movie that resembles Ferrara's movie as much as the Times Square of 1981 looks like the Disneyfied Times Square of 2013.

Shae (Danielle Panabaker) is a student hurting after being dumped by her married lover. A sympathetic fellow bartender, Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), takes her out for a night of revelry that ends badly when Shae is escorted home by a guy who turns vicious.

Lu supports Shae when she decides to go to the police. But ultimately, Lu has a more direct approach when it comes to exacting retribution. The two team up for a rip-roaring rampage that ultimately exorcises Shae's demons, but fails to satiate the clearly unbalanced Lu, who turns out to be not all that discriminating when it comes to her victims.

LaLiberte makes for a memorable femme fatale. Her performance alone may make the movie a worthy watch.

But the film itself is an exercise in disconnect. The violence should be more unsettling, but Chick defaults to artsy technique.

Lu's final attack, which involves dressing in a geisha mask and wielding a samurai sword, is as lovely to look at as it can be, given that it depicts an act of senseless violence, but it is self-defeating when it comes to eliciting an emotional response. It is the flaw that defines this whole movie and renders girls and boys both losers. HH

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 14, 2013 C16