A Bad Case Of Crabs: Barry Levinson's THE BAY

When you think of the found-footage horror genre, a name like Barry Levinson doesn’t usually spring to mind. After all, what possible interest could the Oscar-winning director behind Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam have in the format? But the Baltimore-based filmmaker has an ecological agenda to explore in The Bay (produced by Paranormal Activity’s Oren Peli), which raises real concerns about the effects of pollution in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. It does so through the device of a terror flick about murderous, mutated crustaceans, but anything that helps to get the word out will do, I suppose.

The Bay recounts the events of one serious bummer of a Fourth Of July celebration, as seen through the lenses of various video devices utilized by the citizens of Claridge, Maryland. Variously, we follow the action through footage taken by a local news crew, police surveillance cameras, a young girl’s FaceTime conversation, and more. Right around the time of the big crab-eating competition, a mysterious plague seems to sweep through the entire town, afflicting the locals with horrifying boils and causing them to spit up blood. As the emergency room fills up with frantic, seemingly diseased townspeople, we hear tell of a pair of ecology-minded scuba divers whose bodies were recently discovered floating in the Bay. The duo was chewed up as though a bull shark had gotten at them, but as we learn more and more about the town’s corrupt Mayor and the variety of pollutants being dumped into the Bay—chicken crap from the local poultry mill, waste from a nearby nuclear plant—it becomes apparent that something nastier is taking place. We are told that the Bay is now 40 % lifeless (a true statistic, as it turns out), and what life does still exist there is being preyed upon by isopods—normally tiny crustacean lifeforms that have been growing to unusual size thanks to pollution. The entire water supply of Claridge has been tainted with isopod larvae, and both the marine life and the townspeople are being eaten alive from the inside-out by the nasty bugs…who have a particular taste for tongues.

With its Fourth Of July setting, corrupt city officials, and what appears at first to be a flesh-eating virus, The Bay sometimes feels like Jaws meets Cabin Fever. It takes awhile for the real threat to emerge, and at times it seems like the film is piling on too many potential explanations for the chaos. A good deal of the action is documented by a young intern from the local TV station (Kether Donohue), and her running commentary—particularly with regards to the impending arrival by boat of an unsuspecting young couple and their baby—is a bit silly. There’s also never really any explanation why some people remain unaffected by the isopod massacre, considering that nearly the entire town is wiped out by it. That said, the idea of oversized bugs munching their way out of your body is pretty horrific, and the many scenes of bloody, tongueless townspeople are suitably disgusting. CGI bugs are exactly the kind of special effects that don’t usually translate well to the found-footage format, but the ones seen here are used sparingly and effectively. You probably won’t go to bed afraid that isopods are going to get you after watching The Bay, but you’ll probably want to skip the crab legs next time you eat seafood.

31 Days Of Horror 2012 (Part 11)

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943): The word "atmospheric" gets thrown around in discussions of director Jacques Tourneur's work almost as much as the word "adorkable" is used to describe Zooey Deschanel. But it's certainly apt. Maybe even more so than the director's Cat People and Curse Of The Demon, I Walked With A Zombie goes for an overall mood of gorgeously-shot eeriness rather than big, spectacular scares. A Canadian nurse (Frances Dee) is hired to look after the brain-damaged wife of a plantation manager (Tom Conway) in the West Indies, and her curiosity about the woman's mysterious ailment leads her to investigate alternative treatments--like the ones practiced in voodoo rituals by the local plantation workers. We learn of a love triangle between Paul, his wife Jessica, and Paul's brother Wesley, which may have led to her condition. The possibility arises that Jessica has fallen under a voodoo curse, and that she may not even be technically alive at all anymore. But who cursed her, and why? The film keeps you guessing as to whether or not supernatural forces really are at work, or if it's all the result of jealousy, forbidden love, and mental illness. Viewers drawn to the title looking for a Romeroesque apocalypse of walking corpses will be pretty disappointed--I Walked With A Zombie is much more of a romantic melodrama with supernatural undertones than anything else. But it remains a sterling example of classy studio horror of the era. And even nearly 70 years later, the image of the giant, pop-eyed voodoo enforcer Carrefour is still pretty startling.

REC (2007) and REC 2 (2009): If you wanna make me roll my eyes at you, recommend I watch a) another goddamned zombie movie, b) another goddamned found-footage movie, or c) a goddamned found-footage zombie movie. But the first two installments in the Spanish-language REC movie series make these tired horror cliches fresh, exciting, and terrifying all over again. The key to the series' success so far (a third film has been released in Spain, but I have no idea when it'll arrive in North America) has been its inventive use of the you-are-there immediacy of the found footage format (courtesy of co-directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza), and a fascinating mythology that blurs the line between the supernatural and the scientific. In the 2007 kickoff to the franchise, we follow a TV crew recording a show called While You're Asleep as they follow a group of firemen on their nightly duties. When the firemen are summoned to a nearby apartment building on a mysterious emergency call, they find themselves--along with the terrified cameraman and TV host (Manuela Velasco)--trapped inside the now-quarantined building with its hapless residents as a strange virus, transmitted through blood and saliva, turns its victims into the spazziest ghouls this side of Return Of The Living Dead. As the story progresses, we learn that the building's penthouse has been home to a mysterious old priest who has been performing strange experiments on a young girl. The hair-raising final moments of REC take us inside the penthouse as the remainder of the building is overtaken by the lunatic zombies, who are not undead at all but are instead victims of a particularly contagious strain of demonic possession. The priest who lived there had been trying to find a scientific cure for the strain, but to no avail...and his unbelievably gross Patient Zero is still lurking about! 2009's REC 2 picks up mere moments later, as a SWAT team enters the still-quarantined building with a health official (Jonathan D. Mellor) who is not what he seems. The sequel keeps things fresh with a whole new bag of cinematic tricks--things veer into Aliens territory, not to mention first-person-shooter video game territory, when the SWAT guys activate their helmet-cams, and the perspective shifts in Act Two to a group of young video pranksters who sneak into the building hoping to sell footage to the nightly news. REC 2 throws a number of crazy surprises at you, like the reveal that kicks off Act Three, and the movie's stomach-churning final twist. Some story points don't hold up upon consideration--for instance, why would anyone conduct such risky experiments with a dangerous contagion inside an apartment building full of innocent civilians? Wouldn't a concrete bunker in the desert be more appropriate? But you'll be too busy being scared out of your wits to dwell on such questions for long. Reviews on the third film in the series, which sounds like it deviates from the original story by taking place at a wedding (?), have not been promising, but in any event I'm glad the filmmakers kept the cameras rolling for the first two outstanding installments. Watch these at night with the lights out if you think you've got the guts, but I watched the second one for the first time this very morning and, even in broad daylight, it still freaked me out.