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Optica

USA 2013
produced by
David R. Williams, Chris Gurnett for Red Scream Films, Razor Wire Alchemy, Carnivorous Numbers
directed by David R. Williams
starring Chris Phillips, Mark Levandovski, Chris Gurnett, Robert X Willis
written by David R. Williams, Chris Gurnett, music by Frederic Mauerhofer

review by
Mike Haberfelner

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For an art project, a young man (Chris Phillips) goes out into The Hollows, a wooded area that's supposed to be cursed and might have been the location of as many as 150 murders, armed only with a video camera and video glasses.

At first, everything goes really well, he finds lots of weird things in the forest he wouldn't have expected (including an old self-made oil drill) but that make great pictures, but the darker it gets, the less comfortable he feels: He hears strange noises, finds traces of violence (though perhaps only in his mind), and he can't take the feeling he's being watched. Since it's too late to go back to the car and return to civilisation now, our hero builds himself a big fire to ward off whatever it is ... but as soon as he has dozed off, the fire is extinguished, much to his terror, and now he knows something's just waiting to attack. He runs, and makes it to a house where he hopes to get help or at least a telephone - but what he finds is much more disturbing than anything he witnessed out in the forest: Weird and possibly Satanic objects, pages torn from a book of Black Magic, sacrificial knives ... and then he witnesses someone outside, a masked man - or something worse.

 

Shot as a found footage movie, Optica is quite certainly one of the better films of the fad, basically because it's based on a solid story arc (even if the set-up could have been cropped a little) and thus has a real mystery at its center, and it doesn't relie on all these mainstays that one has come to hate about the genre, like gross overacting of the behind-the-camera-guy, an over-reliance on shaky camerawork in place of suspense, too many cheap home-made effects (the tapping of fingers on tent-walls is my [least] favourite of those) to fake authenticity and the like, and totally outrageous ideas why these people might want to hold on their cameras. Instead, Optica relies on build-up, growing suspense and nicely set shocks, and a few really macabre twists towards the ending.

Pretty good, actually!

 

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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Thanks for watching !!!

 

 

In times of uncertainty of a possible zombie outbreak, a woman has to decide between two men - only one of them's one of the undead.

 

There's No Such Thing as Zombies
starring
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special appearances by
Debra Lamb and Lynn Lowry

 

directed by
Eddie Bammeke

written by
Michael Haberfelner

produced by
Michael Haberfelner, Luana Ribeira and Eddie Bammeke

 

now streaming at

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Robots and rats,
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Tales to Chill
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Tales to Chill
Your Bones to
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a collection of short stories and mini-plays
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Tales to Chill
Your Bones to

the new anthology by
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Out now from
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