The Sigil (2012)

You know, there are times when I worry about the direction the horror genre is going in, especially these low budget ones. I can respect them trying, trying to make something out of nothing. But that's what Kickstarter is for now.

Forty-two bodies are discovered in a Los Angeles house, and the authorities pass it off as a radiation leak. Not sure how they managed that, since none of it makes any bloody sense, but they did. The sister of one of the deceased is Devan (Devan Liljedhal), and her friends Brandon (Brandon Cano-Errrecart, who is also the director and co-writer) and Nate (Nathan Dean Snyder) go to investigate, coming across Miki (Miki Matterson) and her boyfriend/friend/possible brother Matt (Mathew Black).

Oh and, by the way, despite the fact that this film constantly keeps mentioning that the death total is forty-two, in fact the back of the box reads "where he and 41 others perished", we get a close up shot of a newspaper article which reads "43 found dead in Los Angeles building".

Normally I would commend a group trying to do a production on a small budget. But, when you have on the cover of your film the words "Welcome to the dawning of a new horror phenomenon", you automatically set the bar extremely high. And this film failed miserably by giving us the same old crap we're used to, or by inputting some really confusing bits so you don't really know what's going on. And then, to top it all of, they put "LA 2014", so these events take place next year, and the tag line "They never saw it coming", have a picture of the LA skyline with a gas mask looming over, it implies that whatever it is, it will devastate the city, it's widespread. Instead we have a film that's focused around one fucking building.

This 'found footage' film does switch between first person from the camera and third person looking at the characters I initially thought was a good thing, because that was one of the main problems with most found footage films; that one character constantly records everything even though there are moments when he shouldn't. You know, like when your friend is being attacked. Until I remembered the start of the film said "These damaged tapes were retrieved from a house located in west Los Angeles", which actually means we shouldn't be seeing any of these scenes. Do you want to know why 'Cloverfield' basically mastered this technique? By filming the necessary bits, stopping the footage when needed, and we come back to the characters at a later point.

Then again, it's not the first time the the film lied. "These tapes contain graphic and disturbing  images", yeah no they don't. "No connection has been found between the tape's content's and the events 6 months prior" except for Devan constantly mentioning the brother who died in the "events 6 months prior". You cannot have a message saying this is found footage and not have all of it found footage, you can't have it both ways. If they didn't put the whole FBI thing at the start on it would have been fine.

But it would help if I actually cared about the characters. I mean, within five minutes we see our lead girl Devan hear her mother cry over the death of her (Devan) brother, her (mother) son, and IMMEDIATELY leaves. She doesn't stop to help her mother go through this hard time, oh no she just runs off to Los Angeles. Her friend Nate is an unlikable jackass who, as the film goes on, you want to punch in the face. Miki, who I had to watch three or scenes again to learn her name, acts like a bitch most of the time. Meanwhile Brandon and Matt aren't memorable at all.

The acting itself, I want to say it's terrible, and for the most part it is, but there's something in my mind telling me that they were trying their best. It's no excuse though, it was still bland, it was still uninspired, you can get more emotion out of Kristen Stewart. And then the effects. Oh God the effects. At least other low budget productions attempt to try and make them look good, this film didn't bother. The room is shaking? Well let's just shake the camera and not have the actors do anything, I'm sure that'll work well.

Now the main feature, how scary is this? How scary is the "dawning of a new horror phenomenon"? Not much. You know why I like the settings of most horror found footage films like 'Grave Encounters', 'Grave Encounters 2', 'The Lost Coast Tapes', or to an extent the 'REC' films? Because the settings are huge, it's easy to characters to get lost, to become isolated, the setting is scary, it's unnerving, and there's generally music to help this. This film is set around one house, no-one gets separated, there's no music, there's never something which you see in the corner of your eye, even the setting is bland. This film is about as scary as an episode of the Teletubbies.

So, final thoughts? This isn't good. Oh boy it isn't good. It's like they wanted to do something but had no idea what. The acting is underwhelming, it doesn't even qualify as a horror, there's barely a story, the characters are infuriating, bland, or both, I cannot find one shred of anything good that I can say in this film's defense. Well, okay maybe one thing, it's not the worse thing I've ever seen.