The Bay (2012, Barry Levinson)

Most of The Bay is tolerably tedious and mediocre. Levinson’s doing a found footage documentary—he may also provide the voice of filmmaker—about a bunch of sea cockroaches eating its way through a little Maryland town. It plays like a combination low rent Michael Crichton adaptation—the action skips to various government agencies and their internal camera systems—and a lower rent Jaws. Or more accurately Piranha.

There’s one problem so significant they can’t succeed with it—they’re going to need a bigger boat—that problem is narrator and occasional protagonist Kether Donohue.

So three years after Homeland Security covers up a bunch of mutant sea lice eating hundreds of people in a vacation town on the Fourth of July, Donohue and an unseen documentarian (voice by Levinson I think) get together to have Donohue narrate all the video footage from the incident.

They’re able to get it because screenwriter Michael Wallach and Levinson’s target audience is people who don’t understand how WikiLeaks worked; the in-movie WikiLeaks, Wiki-whatever, gets all the footage and so then Levinson assembles like a horror movie and has Donohue record narration.

The problem is Donohue’s terrible at the narration, terrible at the speaking directly to the camera. She ends up ruining the movie in the end, but for a steady clip during the second act she’s barely narrating and it’s… tolerable.

Though it helps some of the cast can act even with the found footage thing going on. Levinson mixes all sorts of formats without much thought, though I suppose putting too much work into realizing Wallach’s insipid screenplay might have been hard to get excited about. The movie's target audience is also people who don’t understand how 24-hour clocks work. In addition to technology and probably protein in chicken shit. The film’s got a strong environmental message about pollution but it’s also very bad and very silly at times so it’s impossible to take it very seriously.

If it weren’t for Donohue—and if the acting from government officials weren’t so terrible—The Bay probably would be okay. It wouldn’t be good because Levinson’s got zero touch for the found footage thing and no apparent ear for “real” dialogue, but it wouldn’t be as bad.

Stephen Kunken’s okay as the doctor—it’s obvious The Bay does not care about verisimilitude when they don’t even bother finding out what Kunken’s position at an ER would be called. He’s something like the attending personal physician for waiting room patients. It must have been hard to watch this one as a personal friend of Levinson and have to talk to him about it.

Frank Deal’s terrible as the mayor, who’s got that factory farmed chicken money in his corrupt pockets and calls in the National Guard without anyone knowing to keep the outbreak isolated.

Christopher Denham and Nansi Aluka are okay as the oceanographers who get a very important flashback subplot threaded throughout the micro-monster movie so it’ll have maximal impact for presumably disinterested audience. Levinson’s pretty craven in his indifference to trying to make The Bay good at all. It’s contemptuous of the found footage horror audience it assumes it’ll have.

Kristen Connolly is almost good as a vacationer. She’d be good if it weren’t for the movie itself being bad.

And then a quick shoutout for Robert C. Treveiler, who plays the CDC guy who’s got terrible, goofy dialogue but Treveiler still holds it together reasonably well. He’d probably be the hero in a big budget version.

The Bay is bad. It’s worse than it needs to be thanks to Donohue’s terrible turn as narrator; she’s even likable in the found footage parts too. Even though you’re predisposed to dislike her because of the narration. Worse, the opening scene with her is she and Levinson talking about how he should’ve hired someone who would do the narration better.

It’s like you’re agreeing to give it a pass on the bad from the start, which is an interesting device but maybe shouldn’t be the most significant device you come up with for a piece of work. Then again Levinson giving up after the first three minutes are a flop explains a lot.

The Cabin in the Woods (2011, Drew Goddard)

I didn’t have much hope for Cabin in the Woods; though, I mean, director and co-writer Drew Goddard… he’s gone on to stuff. Good stuff. Right?

But if I’d known it was written in three days—it shows—and cost $30 million—it actually looks pretty darn good for $30 million, saving the money shots until the final third or so. And I guess it’s well-paced? Like, it’s terribly long and exasperating as the film threats the various unlikable cast members but then once it gets into the “final girl” sequence, it’s a lot better. I foolishly even had the wrong final girl picked; I thought Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon were going to do something interesting with genre. Or maybe I just assumed they were going to try to do something interesting. Maybe feign something interesting.

I didn’t expect them to mix together a few standard sci-fi tropes, the Evil Dead, a not-Ace Ventura Jim Carrey vehicle, a pseudo-gory Texas Chainsaw knock-off, Whedon and Goddard’s celebrity “Lost” fanfic, maybe two other things I recognized and forgot, plus all the horror in-jokes and references I didn’t get. I got the Hellraiser one, of course, because that one was peculiarly… not desperate but maybe wishful. Like for a moment it became a different movie. Though I was confused the whole time because I thought it was supposed to be the merman not the Hellraiser guy. Cabin is often very talky and very fast and it’s not clear during the first half they’re ever going to painfully detail the big secret with a special genre guest star (if you’re willing to stretch genre). It’s a solid guest star “get,” but it would’ve been better with just a voice over and maybe just been Jamie Lee Curtis.

Even getting past the bad writing—because it’s not just a string of tropes fit into very specific, very literal boxes, it’s still terribly written—the acting is all atrocious as well. Cabin creates a role just for Bradley Whitford—paired with Richard Jenkins like they’re Lemmon and Matthau or something—and it’s bad. Like, the part’s bad and Whitford’s obnoxious. Jenkins is better, but definitely not good. He too is obnoxious, with a more explicit misogyny thing thrown in for good measure.

But the leads—Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchison, Chris Hemsworth, Jesse Williams, Fran Kranz—they’re bad. Hutchison, Hemsworth, and Kranz are really, really, really bad.

It’s bad writing on the characters and all, but the acting’s still bad. If Connolly and Williams were really good, there might be some relief but they’re not. They’re just not as bad as the rest of them. They don’t get actively worse. When it seems like Connolly might be getting better but then doesn’t, it’s not a negative. It maintains. Hemsworth, Kranz, and Hutchison get worse throughout.

Good photography from Peter Deming, okay editing from Lisa Lassek (Lassek’s cuts are fine, the content’s just bad), strangely unmemorable score by David Julyan. I remember a lot of emphasis music but not any of the specifics about it, which is probably for the best.

Goddard’s direction is confused for the first half, when he’s homaging left and right, but it’s at least a low competent for the second half, as the film movies into a new realm.

The second realm is… technically more interesting than the first and the film definitely doesn’t get as bad as it sometimes threatens. But there’s only so good it’s ever going to get given the leads. And the writing.

Maybe it would’ve been better as a TV show? They could’ve called it “Lost in the Woods” or something.