Mockingbird (2014)
Ted Hentschke
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Starring Barak Hardley, Todd Stashwick, Alexandra Lydon, and Audrey Marie Anderson
Directed by Bryan Bernito
Horror is a saturated market, and it is very easy for a title to get lost in the miasma. This is especially true for unknown directors who lack a big name distributor. I tend to give things a fair shake; even if all of my being tells me that the movie will be trash, I will begrudgingly pop it in, start it up, and see how long I can go before I turn it off. Sometimes, I even make it all the way to the credits. Even so, there are many films that will sit on my floor, having been plopped in only to be ejected after a few minutes in a motion akin to me reflexively swatting a spider that dangles into view while you’re driving. This is where unknown horror goes to die, along with westerns and romcoms that for some reason companies still inexplicably send to me.
So if this were a standard indie found footage project from some random hopeful trying to make Paranormal Activity money, I would understand why DreadCentral missed it. This isn’t that. I came across Mockingbird while looking through a list of Blumhouse Production movies as research for their WonderCon press roundtable, and saw a name I didn’t recognize. The wikipedia page was barren, with the cast listed in an order that I can only assume was dictated by a random number generator. When the actor for “Jacob’s Friend #4” is listed before one of the three main characters, I cannot fathom any logic that led to that ordering. And no, it wasn’t order of appearance, I checked that too.
This isn’t a no name director, either. This is written and directed by by Bryan Bertino, whose previous film was The Strangers. Not exactly a robust body of work, but The Strangers was a big enough deal that his second movie six years later should have made some kind of a stir. With a major producer and a real distributor, it must be some next level bad to have been so profoundly passed over.
That’s what’s confusing to me, since this conflux of oddities had me expecting the movie would be 1 out of 5 level trash. And yet, the movie wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t great, for sure, but it certainly isn’t a shameful pair of home alone sweatpants, unwashed and hidden when company comes by. It’s the baked chicken of horror, a C+ effort brought out when you have family over but it isn’t a holiday. An admirable effort, clearly falling short of the bar set by The Strangers, but not tarnishing a legacy.
Shot in an all too familiar found footage style, the film takes place from three points of view. The first is from husband and wife Tom (Todd Stashwick) and Emmy (Audrey Marie Anderson), normal parents in a seemingly average household. With two kids and a cat, all is well when a mysterious package arrives: a camera that will not stop filming. Spending a night alone while the kids are being looked after, the couple’s planned romantic evening is interrupted when it turns out that the camera wasn’t a prize for winning a contest, but instead a way for a mysterious malignant force to look into their lives.
Beth’s (Alexandra Lydon) story is similar; an isolated college girl whose roommates are away, she struggles with a recent breakup. She’s less excited about the camera than the husband and wife, providing her only a minor distraction before more dreadful events start to unfold. Soon, both Beth and the Tom/Emmy combo receive a tape of a young boy being shot, with the instructions to not stop filming. Things only get worse for there, as events orchestrate to ramp up the terror of each party as they spiral towards an intense, if a bit predictable conclusion.
The third party is a down on his luck loser named Leonard (Barak Hardley), who contrary to the other two parties is on the adventure of a lifetime. He thinks the camera is his chance to win money on a gameshow, and is provided a clown costume which he wears to complete various challenges. The worst thing he has to do is get kicked in the balls and make farting sounds in a women’s restroom, so his is a much more lighthearted romp. It fits into an overall more sinister plot, but he is unaware of it, even if the audience figures out where it is heading long before.
There’s some cool visual design and some genuinely tense moments. The film is broken up into segments, like some sick editor broke stitched it together for some black market distribution. Unfortunately, there are some pretty serious plot inconsistencies once the final twist is revealed. I’m getting into spoiler territory in the next paragraph, so if you want to watch it fresh, my spoiler free talking of the twist is that it absolutely ruined the movie for me.
SPOILER ALERT:
It turns out that a bunch of kids were behind the whole thing. The oldest one looks about 13. The climax comes when the various parties all meet up in a house filled with balloons and end up shooting each other, so it make kind of sense that they would have to use trickery to kill their targets rather than direct violence. Setting aside the obvious questions of how kids would know how to rig up a video camera to never stop filming and transmit the feed, let alone afford all this shit, or do it unnoticed, there’s still one major flaw.
At one point in the movie, Beth refuses to open a package, which prompts a dark figure to kick open her door and send her into the closet screaming. How the hell is an 8 year old supposed to kick open a door? Even the oldest looked like he was underdeveloped for 13, so it doesn’t make any reasonable sense. It all just comes together so stupidly, that I wish they would have just done like they did in The Strangers and never explain it.
SPOILERS OVER:
Despite the interesting stuff in terms of pacing and setting up the segments, the film is an illogical mess that falls far short of Bertino’s previous effort. It feels like a cheap knockoff that would have been released to ape off of the success of The Strangers, and 6 years too late. As a found footage film, it’s decent. I wouldn’t ever tell someone not to watch it, but I wouldn’t bust it out at a party as a hidden gem that everyone simply must see.
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Film
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