Do You Have The Crazy?

I know Andrew Sweeney knows some of these folks, and I've met a couple of them over the years. Criminally, I still haven't seen the film.

I haven't seen this movie but damn if that isn't a good tagline.

Didn't Ang Lee employ a similar tagline for Brokeback Mountain, "Do You Have the Gay?"

Sounds like a neat little film. Website's cool.

First off Happenin, if Ang Lee had such a tagline it would've been bastardized by the internet into "Do U have teh Ghey?!!!!!" within five seconds of it being posted.

I saw this a few months ago, in the midnight program at the Seattle film festival.

I kept my expectations low, because it was getting crazy buzz from previous festival appearances and you know how the hype machine can get out of control. You walk into what's supposed to be the next Blair Witch Project and instead you get Versus or something. (Not that I'm knocking Versus. Zombies and animal-fu gore-socky in the woods? Fun. Just, y'know, not the second coming of Evil Dead 2 or anything. Anyway, like I said, X-treem buzz = careful with your expectations.)

So, bottom line, I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I thought it was a very clever and fairly original take on a specific and somewhat over-familiar horror sub-genre. The filmmakers figured out how to make their low budget work as an advantage; instead of laboring under the constraint of small cast and limited locations, they set up a looping structure so we keep going back to previous locations and learning new things about what happened. Very smart.

That said, the last ten minutes aren't as successful as the rest of the movie, and the air goes out of the film a bit. There's an extremely intense situation, a sort of existential standoff, that sits and spins its wheels a little longer than it should. I sort of get why it's done the way it is, to emphasize the despair of the scene and make you start to wonder if maybe in a larger sense this is all pointless head-bashing-on-wall and the world is too fucked up even to bother trying to survive in it any more, but it's still unpleasant to watch, in not a good way.

Up until then, though? Winner. Great, morbid sense of humor, marvelously clever writing, a few excellent moments of gore, some real intensity, and (until the end) a strong, and successfully variable, sense of pace.

A superior independent horror film. Me says check it out.

It screened here at a secret screening during the Atlanta film festival but I was out of town so I missed it. I've heard of some of the things these guys have done but I've not seen any of their previous work either. Atlanta can be very fragmented like that, with lots of interesting things happening 2 blocks away from other things with no one knowing about the other.